


emptiness man

by statusquo_ergo



Category: Suits (US TV)
Genre: 9x05 rewrite, Fix-It, M/M, Season/Series 09, post 9x05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-10-05 20:37:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20494976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/statusquo_ergo/pseuds/statusquo_ergo
Summary: There's more here than meets the eye.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Though nearly all of the dialogue in this chapter is lifted directly from “[If the Shoe Fits](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s09e05)” (s09e05), minor edits have been made to correct for glaring inaccuracies in timeline-related realism, general legal procedure, and one truly stupid flaw in canonical consistency. In an effort to be as succinct as possible, the B and C plots of the episode (Louis and Sheila, and Katrina and Brian, respectively) have been cut from the narrative. (I’m sure they’re still happening, but they’re not being addressed here.)

“Harvey, I’m sorry, I can’t come over tonight.”

Harvey nearly drops his phone right then, making a clumsy effort to pin it to his ear with his shoulder as he digs into his pocket for the keys to his apartment and tries to keep his grip on the pizza box in his hand.

“What?” he fumbles, finally resorting to putting the phone on speaker and setting it on top of the box. “What do you mean you can’t come over tonight?” Shouldering the door open, he raises his phone back to his ear and looks forlornly at the box. “I got pizza, I even got those stupid yellow tomatoes that you like.”

“Harvey,” Donna chastises, “something came up last-minute.”

Of course it did, he thinks sourly, not putting much thought into whether he’s more distressed by her absence or the fact that he wasted eighteen bucks on this pizza that no one’s going to eat. Well, that’s his fault, isn’t it, for getting tomatoes on the whole damn thing instead of just half.

“An old friend called me out of the blue,” she elaborates with a little grin in her voice, like he should know why this is a special occasion without needing to be told.

“Well then why don’t you come by later?” he presses. “I could reheat the pizza. It’ll be forty percent worse, but that’s okay.”

Donna makes a quiet little laughing sound, the kind of noise she makes when she thinks he’s being cute. “Why do I get the feeling that this isn’t about pizza?”

He sighs into the inevitable, his annoyance morphing easily into indifferent acceptance, and resigns himself to his fate. “All right, look,” he says. “It’s not something I advertise, but I watch _Survivor_.”

“You watch _Survivor_?” Donna repeats as though such a thing is stunning.

“I do.”

“You shouldn’t admit that.”

Probably, but it’s not like it matters.

“It’s an underrated show but I love it,” he says, “and I was hoping to get you into it.”

I was hoping to find something for us to do in the quiet, I was hoping to find something for us to have in common. I was hoping to invent a tradition that doesn’t come with strings attached, a fun little escape from the real world as we get to watch other people making asses of themselves for our amusement and we don’t even have to care about what happens to them in the morning.

“Okay,” she says, “then what do you say I take a rain check?”

I say it’s better than nothing.

“Alright,” he concedes, turning toward the kitchen and shoving the pizza box onto the counter, “but it’s under protest. Who’s this old friend, anyway?”

“_Survivor_? What are you, a thousand?”

Time freezes.

Harvey raises his eyes from the pizza box and holds the phone to his ear and his lips part soundlessly and time has stopped dead.

_It’s time, Harvey. It’s time._

Rewind. Start again.

These are new first words, new last words. This is another try, a do-over, a monolith rebuilt from the ground up. This is a step back into the past, this is a chance to do it right, to see all their stupid mistakes coming from miles away and move a bit to the left, just out of the way of catastrophe.

“I get it,” he says, even though he doesn’t, even though this doesn’t make any sense at all, even though he never would have imagined this in his wildest dreams. “The plans weren’t for you,” he says, because this must have been planned, this must have been orchestrated by ephemeral forces, someone who knows how badly the universe fucked up and wants to give them a second shot.

“They were for me.”

It’s easy. Just do it right this time.

Donna laughs softly. “Have a great time, Harvey.”

I have to.

I will.

Mike smirks as though today is just another day, tipping the glass of Scotch he’s fixed for himself as though he’s too restless to stand still, too nervous to stay in place even though he’s attached to the counter, even though he can’t bring himself to move from his carefully positioned hiding spot.

“You know,” Harvey says as a smile creeps across his face, “just because she gave you a key doesn’t mean you’re staying here.”

You could, though. If you wanted to, you could. I know you won’t, but I wouldn’t mind.

“Why would I stay here?” Mike asks, tipping his glass and furrowing his brow. “I’ve got my old apartment that you’re pretending to rent for me.”

Figured that one out, did you? Did someone let it slip? My big secret revealed, and do you know how to read those tea leaves the right way?

“‘Rick Sorkin’?” Mike raises the glass to his lips and laughs to himself. “You’ve gone soft.”

Have I? How long has it been, then, one year? Two? When did I lose my killer’s instinct, when did I dull my cutthroat edge?

“I was using it as a tax shelter.”

“And what’s the name of that tax shelter, ‘I’m a Softie’?” Mike teases, because he’ll take him at his word, he won’t ask “Why,” or “How,” or “Are you lying to me,” because they’re them, and this is how they work, even after all this time. This is the way they’ll always work, this is the way things will always be.

“Maybe I’ve always been a softie,” Harvey defends, because it’s true, it’s been true for a long time, and if anyone knows that, it’s Mike, and Mike won’t turn that against him because Mike knows better. Mike understands. He’s been there, too, he’s seen the other side.

“What happened to uh, ‘caring makes you weak’?” Mike taunts, and it’s nice that he remembers the lessons Harvey taught him, even if they’re old, even if they’re dated. Even if they’ve been replaced by bigger and better things, wiser and harder-earned.

“I think you’re confusing ‘caring’ with ‘moving to Seattle,’” Harvey fires back, even though Mike’s mission is noble, even though his cause is just, because running isn’t strong, running isn’t fair. Mike nods, handing him the easy win, and Harvey knows he isn’t here to apologize for following his heart, he knows that isn’t what this is about, but he can want and wish and hope, and he can admit that he’s hurting with words that will get lost in the translation.

“Speaking of Seattle,” he goes on, “don’t you have some old ladies looking to sue the condo association, or whatever big case you’ve got going these days?”

Please, tell me it’s been worth it. Please, tell me this hasn’t all been for nothing. That’s all, that’s all I need.

“Yes I do,” Mike says, because he’s a good and kind man doing good and important work, “but those ladies are gonna have to wait, because I always have time for an old friend.”

Harvey smiles as the idea of contentment, the possibility of satisfaction finally settles within reach, just over the horizon, just beyond the crest of that hill rising in the distance. Then Mike steps forward and reaches his arm out, and Harvey steps forward into his embrace, and this is a fresh start. A new beginning.

“It’s good to see you, Harvey.”

Harvey pats Mike’s back firmly, just to be sure he’s real, solid, here, finally, after all this time.

“Great to see you, Mike.”

Mike doesn’t keep his face nestled in Harvey’s shoulder for long before he’s distracted by the pizza box still on the counter, but Harvey indulges in the slow slide of Mike’s hand across his back and imagines that it means something, that it’s the start of an apology for being away for so long, the first hint of indemnification for the way things ended.

“Is that Gionno’s?”

It’s alright. They have time.

“It is,” Harvey says. “You like yellow tomatoes?”

Mike does, as it happens, or he says he does, anyway, and maybe Harvey can suffer them just this once. Before he can get to the cabinet for plates, Mike opens the box and claims the biggest slice, and they abandon the decorum of the dining table to mill about the living room, gesturing with their food as they fill each other in on all the things they’ve missed with embellished stories that shamelessly make themselves out to be better than they are and their adversaries infinitely worse. Day after day, Mike’s been saving the world, fulfilling his mission and making a name for himself as he sheds the scandals of his past, everything that made him who he is, and Harvey preens and lavishes praise on him and tells himself that this is the way things are supposed to be, this is what they fought for all along. This is the ending they always wanted, the ending they deserve.

“Let me get this straight,” Mike says once Harvey’s finished spooling out his ignoble doings. “Donna starts dating a client, breaks _privilege_ for him, and _then_ you two end up together.”

“Donna didn’t tell you?” Harvey asks as he walks to the sofa, the skin on the back of his neck prickling at his own merciless rehashing of all the wrong turns he’s taken, all the mistakes he can’t seem to stop himself from making.

“Yeah,” Mike teases as he sits in one of the club chairs, crossing his brand new Converses and waving his Scotch, “well, if I was hearing this for the first time, I’d let it go, but a real friend needs to enjoy the shame in person.”

Shame, is that what this is?

It’s a shame we let this all happen. It’s a shame we didn’t keep in touch. Shame it’s been so long.

Don’t ruin it again.

“Well, while you’re doing that,” Harvey says, “let’s have it.”

Mike has the audacity to look surprised by the request, his face going slack. “Have what?”

“Why you’re really here,” Harvey says flatly, the time for games gone just as suddenly as Mike himself appeared. “‘Cause I’m not buying you showed up unannounced without a reason.”

“If you really must know,” Mike confesses immediately, “I’m here on business.”

“The business of begging for your old job back?” Harvey asks, racing in the opposite direction of his pathetic wish that this might just be a social call, that they can go back to the way things were in the good old days if they do their very best to pretend. “Because it’s too late. We’ve replaced you.”

That was too much. That was a step too far.

Mike only narrows his eyes. “Yeah,” he ponders, “but do they have a law degree?”

Mike is a good man, a kind man. Mike knows how to play this game of theirs.

“Shit,” Harvey swears, all too glad to pretend that everything is going according to plan. “I knew there was something I forgot to check.”

“You see, if you had my memory, you wouldn’t forget things like that.”

“No, I’d just forget to lock my briefcase full of weed.”

“The lock was broken,” Mike says indignantly.

“Your brain is broken.”

Mike grins, and Harvey chuckles, and things aren’t quite the way they used to be, but they’re past that now, with deeper gutters in their wake and bigger mountains still to climb, but this can be good, too. This can be better than before.

“Come on, give it to me,” he says, because it’s all very well and good to pretend, but they can’t do it forever, but whatever help Mike came here for, whatever angle he needs, Harvey will give it to him. Whatever he wants. “Who’s the asshole you’re going up against?”

“Actually, I think you know him pretty well,” Mike says thoughtfully. “His name is Harvey Sphincter. He plays it real tight.”

He isn’t really surprised. No, he isn’t.

“You gotta be kidding me,” Harvey retorts, ducking around the part where this makes them adversaries, where this makes tonight an illicit act of colluding with the enemy. “A five hour flight and all you came up with was ‘sphincter’?”

“I stand by sphincter,” Mike brushes him off. “But you want something better? How about this. I represent Jeremy Wall, and he wants out of his contract with Brick Street.”

Oh, so this isn’t a game.

He knew. In hindsight, it was obvious, and he knew it all along.

No, really.

“Wait a second,” he tries to recover, “‘out’?”

“Mm-hmm. Jeremy’s deal stipulates they do no harm to his image,” Mike chastises as though they both know he’s got the upper hand, as though Harvey is just being obstinate, “and exploiting overseas workers is textbook harm.”

“Exploiting its workers?” Harvey repeats. “Where’s he getting that idea?”

“He went on a goodwill trip,” Mike says. “He saw the factory himself.”

“Well, if you want me to sell them on this, he’s gonna have to give them their money back,” Harvey reasons, because he’s not going to roll over quite so easily, but Mike came to him for help and he’ll do what he can to live up to expectations.

“Oh, he’s not giving back a dime,” Mike corrects, and Harvey frowns.

“He’s not walking for free.”

“I figured you might say that,” Mike says, pawing through his backpack to pull out a plain blue file folder, “so I brought a little incentive. Breach of contract.”

Mike grins as though Harvey should be proud of him, everything he’s learned and how far he’s come.

He is. He is.

“I see what this is,” Harvey says as he settles back into the sofa, feeling his knowing smile reach up to his eyes. “You don’t want me to convince Brick Street. You wanna take me on.”

“I take you on, kick your ass,” Mike says flippantly. “I mean, what’s the difference?”

This is how these things are supposed to go, isn’t it? Student, master, all those old clichés. This is the closure they were denied. This is what they should have been looking for all along, this is what Mike left to hunt down on the other side of the country.

He was never going to find it alone.

“Well, in that case,” Harvey says, “why don’t you and Jeremy pop by next week? And by ‘pop by,’ I mean sit for a deposition.”

“Are you sure?” Mike teases. “You’re not worried about losing to a lawyer in his prime?”

“I hate to break it to you, Mike,” Harvey brags as it finally hits him that this really isn’t going to be what he thought it was, the joyful reunion he was hoping for when he heard Mike’s voice and saw him standing around the corner, “but I was in my prime before you were born, and I’ll be in it long after you’re dead.”

Mike furrows his brow. “You know that doesn’t make sense, right?”

It doesn’t. Not at all. But he’s doing his best.

Harvey shrugs, averting his eyes from the evening’s end. “It will when you’re in your prime.”

“Then I guess I’ll see you next week,” Mike says, zipping his backpack and pushing himself out of his chair. “Oh,” he stops to turn back with that old cocky smirk that hasn’t changed a bit, “and Harvey, to, um, put this in a way that you might understand, if this ends up going to a jury like they do in _Survivor_, I’ll be the last man standing.”

He walks out as easily as he walked in, not bothering with a proper farewell because they’re beyond such trivialities, they’re bigger than the casual formality of Harvey walking him to the door. Abrupt departures are their specialty. This is what they know how to do.

Harvey frowns to himself as he hears the door fall shut.

“I knew he watched _Survivor,_” he mutters, raising his Scotch to his lips.

They’ve never been able to lie to each other for very long.

\---

Just because Mike is back doesn’t mean that anything has to change. He’s only here for a little while anyway, just until they wrap up this suit; he’s here to represent Jeremy Wall, Plaintiff, bringing charges against Brick Street Athletics, Defendant. Their friendship is a superfluous detail. A minor sideshow.

“Harvey?”

This is just business.

“Samantha,” he greets her as she pins herself to his side. “I was just gonna come see you.”

“No, you weren’t,” she snaps. “You know how I know that? Because my new client—the one you gave me—was served with a lawsuit at your condo last night and you didn’t tell me about it.”

Fair enough.

Harvey schools his face into as indifferent an expression as he can manage and figures his voice will follow suit. “You heard about Brick Street already?”

“Did you think I wouldn’t?”

Well, I’d hoped.

Truthfully, it hadn’t even crossed his mind that she’d want to know.

“Sure, it’s possible,” he says. “You sometimes box in the mornings.”

“Harvey—”

“Samantha, I’m not trying to take them back,” he says as she tries to cut him off on the way into his office. “It’s just a little complicated.”

“What exactly is complicated about it?” she asks with all the deftness and tact of someone who’s already decided that there’s no answer he can give her that will be good enough, no rationale to satisfy her enviably black and white perception.

Eight and a half years are complicated. Three thousand miles are complicated. Missed chances and words unspoken and unexpected thrills and simmering resentment are complicated.

He steps behind his desk as she waits stubbornly in the doorway.

“It’s complicated.”

She stands with her fists jammed against her hips, refusing to hear the message he’s broadcasting loud and clear as he waits for her to storm back to her office to get Brick Street on the phone and threaten or sweet talk or blackmail her way onto the case as though Harvey couldn’t have her thrown off with a single email.

An eternity later, she nods, pursing her lips and narrowing her eyes. “Fine,” she says. “You know what, fine. But if you think I’m letting you take my client, you’ve got another thing coming.”

Turning on her stiletto heels, she stalks back out into the hall, and Harvey sighs when she doesn’t look back.

Sorry, but this one’s not for sale.

\---

When next week finally rolls around, it’s no great surprise that Samantha catches him at the elevators first thing Monday morning. He can’t say he had quite enough foresight to expect it, but it’s happening now, and it would be stupid to pretend he couldn’t have seen it coming.

“Not only did you take my client without telling me,” she greets him, “you scheduled a deposition with the other side?”

He smiles thinly. “I would’ve scheduled it with our side, but that felt like such a waste of money.”

“Well while you’re refusing to take this seriously, Jeremy Wall’s attorney is making himself at home in your office,” she says, nipping at his heels when he walks around her and heads down the hall, “so for both our sakes, I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“Hey,” Mike interrupts as they enter, “Jeremy’s here, so you ready to go do this?”

“You know him?” Samantha says incredulously. “So that’s why you were so eager to take my client from me.”

“Wait, her client?”

The rapid exchange flies completely over his head as Harvey pastes on a cocky grin, looking between the two of them and hoping he’s fooling them at least as much as he’s failing to fool himself into believing he has everything under control.

“Mike,” he says cordially, angling his body away from Samantha to let Mike see her clearly, “meet Samantha Wheeler. I gave her Brick Street about a month ago, I might have forgotten to mention that. Samantha,” he looks back at her and gestures to his right, “meet Mike Ross.”

Crossing her arms, Samantha settles her weight into her right hip. “Mm,” she sneers, arching her eyebrows. “The protégé.”

Mike frowns. “Okay, why did she just say it like that?”

“If I had to take a guess,” Harvey says reflexively, “it’s because she thought you’d be taller.”

“I’m the same height as you.”

Harvey shakes his head wistfully. “The lies we tell ourselves…”

_I’m happy for you._

There are a lot of things that are much easier to say when he doesn’t have to look him in the eye.

_I don’t care._

A lot of things are easier to say when they’re not standing face to face.

_Everyone leaves._

He should have learned his lesson by now.

Harvey’s gaze drifts to middle distance as Mike wrings his hands and Samantha glares at them both.

“It’s because I’m less concerned with meeting you than kicking your ass since _I’m_ the one you’re gonna be going up against,” she interjects, “not him.”

“Hang on,” Harvey panics, because didn’t they settle this already, didn’t she understand? “I didn’t agree—”

“Harvey,” Mike interrupts, “if I may?”

Clutching greedily at the offer of a moment to slow down, a second to turn around and claw his way back through the words they’re hurling past him, to find the meaning hidden at the heart of it, Harvey steps back for Mike to walk across the floor with the smug little Best Closer in Town smile he gets when he thinks he has the upper hand.

Harvey knows it well.

“Look, Samantha, I get it.” Mike raises his hands, a blatant effort to empathize that Harvey figures Samantha will resent. “I’ve been where you are right now a hundred times. It’s so frustrating, but I think we all know Harvey’s gonna take this client back whether you like it or not, so you might as well just let him do it.”

For an instant, suddenly, things are back to the way they used to be. For an instant, the clock winds back four five six years, and Mike is here, and Harvey is here, and the firm is theirs for the taking, theirs to control with a sly wink and a subtle nod and a clever turn of phrase. For an instant, Harvey’s never heard of Andy Forsyth, and Seattle is a made-up place that doesn’t exist, and he and Mike are playing both sides of the table to do the right thing, to tilt the odds In the favor of the side of justice, the side that’ll let them both sleep soundly through the night.

Samantha chuckles.

“That’s about as naïve as hoping we’ll let Jeremy Wall out of his contract.”

Things are different now.

Still, Mike smiles, taking the jab in stride. “Well, this isn’t really about hope,” he says. “It’s about Brick Street doing right by its workers.”

“And if you think that sob story is gonna work here,” Samantha retorts, “you’re wrong.”

Sob stories. Mike’s whole life has been a sob story, a hero’s journey of death and destruction. Loss after loss after loss, one bittersweet victory after another. No silver lining without a rain cloud underneath, a thunderstorm breaking every time he thinks it’s safe to go outside for a minute.

Outside, or all the way across the goddamn country.

“Sob stories are his specialty.”

Harvey regrets the words the instant they leave his mouth, but Mike only looks at him evenly. “I prefer to call it ‘appealing to a jury’s humanity.’”

“Well,” Samantha taunts, “I call it ‘bringing a violin to a gun fight.’”

You’re not a part of this.

Still, Mike smiles at her. “Well, we’ll see what you call it when I’m done.” He shifts his shoulders in an unconscious gesture of defensiveness, or uncertainty, and steps forward. “Anyway, I’ll give you two a minute to discuss who’s gonna take the loss.”

Walking between them toward the door, he pats Harvey’s arm on his way past as though he can’t help himself, as though he can’t be bothered to think better of the gesture. Harvey looks over his shoulder to watch him go.

Samantha scowls.

“Your protégé is a douche.”

_It’s time, Harvey._

“Not gonna argue with you there.”

Well. That was a long time ago.

Smirking, she drums her nails along her forearm, picking at the vulnerability hanging in the air in Mike’s wake. “Then how about not arguing over whose client this is?” she proposes. “Because I got a deposition to get to.”

“You don’t even know this case!”

“I know the client, I know the contract—”

He glowers at her. “And I know the man.”

She leans back, her eyes going wide in a funny mix of real and fake offense. “You think I can’t beat him?”

You’re missing the point entirely.

“Samantha,” he says tersely, “he used to be my guy. He traveled across the country to pick a fight with me. He’s never gonna let me live it down if I duck him.”

And I would be able to live with myself?

Don’t bother. We all know the answer to that one.

“Then we’re doing this together,” she declares, “because this is my client. I’m not just handing them over to you.”

He looks out the door, down the hall where the last trace of Mike has long since disappeared from this place that used to be so full of him, lurking around every corner and behind every door, healing every broken thing he touched. The memory of him, the echo of a man who doesn’t exist in the real world still lingers in the walls, reshaping everything in his image, twisting the future off in a direction almost right but not exactly.

“Okay,” Harvey concedes, “but don’t underestimate him. Whatever else Mike Ross is, he’s just as good as you and me.”

No. He’s twice the man I am.

Samantha saunters out the door, and Harvey closes his eyes. There’s no delaying the inevitable; they’ve got to get started eventually.

It’s now or never.

\---

The video camera is already set up and recording when Harvey walks into the conference room. Whether Mike or Samantha was the one to install it doesn’t really matter, although between the two of them, they probably consider the honor to be some kind of power move; Jeremy Wall, who Harvey mostly recognizes from ESPN, sits next to Mike with a determined look on his face, and it occurs to Harvey that this is hardly the breed of Fortune 500 class action suits Mike claimed to have left to pursue.

Mike looks up at him goadingly, and Samantha bangs the straight edge of her files against the table, and they must have gotten the formalities out of the way before he got here.

It doesn’t matter.

“Mister Wall,” Samantha begins as Harvey sits beside her. “You claim to have seen objectionable factory conditions.”

“I’m not claiming anything,” Jeremy says. “I— I saw them. Those people are miserable.”

_Hundreds of innocent children are suffering the devastating effects of lead poisoning, and they will never be the same._

This is a deposition hearing. This is different.

Harvey makes an effort to look at Jeremy when he talks.

“And misery isn’t a violation of international law. Are they violating international law?”

Jeremy folds his hands on the table in front of him. “I don’t know.”

“No, you don’t,” Harvey says brusquely, “because you’re a basketball player. You’re not a lawyer.”

You’re a bike messenger, not a lawyer. You’re a pothead, a college dropout, a fraud.

It’s nothing personal.

“That doesn’t mean I can’t tell when something’s not right,” Jeremy presses.

Three Gatorades.

Harvey scowls.

“And when exactly did you start thinking something wasn’t right?”

You didn’t even tell me. I had no idea, it wasn’t a fair fight.

Jeremy sits back in his chair. “When I visited that factory six months ago.”

Did you realize it when Andy Forsyth came along? Did you figure it out when he showed you the light at the end of the tunnel? When he told you things could be so much better than they were?

Was it when I asked you to stay?

“And yet, you’re only bringing this up now?” Samantha challenges, snatching at the sudden opportunity. “Why?”

“Because,” Jeremy fumbles, “like you said, I’m a basketball player. I— I didn’t know what to do or who to go to.”

Isn’t it funny that things still ended up the way they did? That you found the perfect person to help you at exactly the right time?

Isn’t it funny how these things just sort of happen?

“No,” Harvey says, “you were afraid you wouldn’t be paid your full contract.”

“Don’t talk to my client like that,” Mike cuts in. “And you can’t speak to his motivations.”

Harvey looks blankly at his notes.

No. He can’t, can he.

“I don’t care about his motivations,” Samantha says snidely. “What I want to know is why he lied about being contacted by an activist named Charles Hu.”

Jeremy shakes his head. “I didn’t lie about anything.”

“You said you didn’t care about the conditions until six months ago,” Harvey reminds him. “He wrote you eighteen months ago. Sounds like a lie to me.”

Everything was fine before then. Everything was going great. Wasn’t it? Weren’t we okay? Wasn’t it good?

“That letter got me a little concerned,” Jeremy says, “but I didn’t take it seriously until I saw the conditions myself.”

Lying by omission doesn’t make the lie any better.

Mike nods.

“And what you need to take seriously,” Samantha mock, “is that you had one year to blow the whistle, and you are six months too late.”

“Bullshit,” Mike blurts out, “that letter was unsolicited. It— It didn’t trigger his awareness.”

Harvey bites his tongue. Did Mike really not see this coming? Is it really a surprise that they know about Charles Hu? Did he think they wouldn’t bring him up?

Did he think that Harvey wouldn’t?

“He just said it did,” Samantha needles. “He used the word ‘concern.’”

“This is a technicality,” Mike says as Jeremy looks nervously between them and Harvey remembers that he can’t speak to anyone else’s motivations.

“No, Mike,” he says, “it’s the terms of his contract.”

Leaning back in her chair, Samantha crosses her arms over her chest. “I think this case is getting dismissed.”

Mike looks at him with hurt in his wide eyes, abandonment and betrayal, and Harvey stands to gather his things.

I would’ve let you go, if you’d asked.

\---

Mike storms into Harvey’s office not five minutes after the deposition ends with fire in his eyes and murder in his sights.

That might be a stretch, but not too much.

“So you really gonna do this?” he seethes as Harvey does his best not to take it to heart.

“Mike, it’s there in black and white.”

Let’s stop pretending this isn’t going to turn out how we know it will. Let’s not pretend we didn’t set ourselves on this path with all the choices we’ve made.

“I don’t care what’s in black and white,” Mike retorts. “He found out about the conditions six months ago, not eighteen. It’s not a violation.”

With everything he has, everything he is, Harvey stops himself from throwing the conversation in another direction entirely, from hurling accusations, from reminding Mike that it was _his_ choice to go, _his_ choice to leave without warning. His choice not to give Harvey a chance to prepare, his choice not to play fair.

This is just business.

“Well, you’re gonna have to explain that to a judge,” he says. “And even if you’re successful, he’ll be on record saying he didn’t give a shit about those people for an entire year.”

An entire year without a word. An entire year without a single returned call, a single answered email, even just a note that things are going alright. That it’s everything you hoped for, everything you’ve always wanted.

And now, this.

“Harvey,” Mike pleads, “they’re exploiting these people and you know it.”

“What I know is, you’re the same old Mike playing that violin to get me to help you.”

Haven’t I done enough? After all this time, haven’t I paid my dues?

Mike glares at him as though this is all a game he’s sick of playing, one big personal vendetta on behalf of the universe.

“I might be the same old Mike,” he spits, “but you are not the same old Harvey.”

The same old Harvey.

He knew it, he knew it all along; from the moment Mike stepped back into his life with a joke, a flippant taunt, he knew what Mike expected. That they could just be them again, that they could pick up right where they left off as though nothing had happened, as though nothing could’ve come between them. As though nothing ever will.

“What’d you just say?”

Mike just keeps glaring.

“You heard me.”

Funny that he’s never thought of Mike as the kind of guy to kick a man when he’s down. Maybe he hasn’t been paying close enough attention.

“That’s why you did this now,” he says. “You know Faye’s breathing down our necks and I can’t fight at full strength.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Mike parries. “Another is that her being here might actually make you fight fair for a change.”

As if they’ve ever fought fair a day in their lives.

“You saying _you’re_ gonna fight fair?”

It comes out like a taunt. A dare. Bet you can’t win this one on a level playing field, bet you can’t treat this like just another case. Bet you can’t do it. Bet you can’t resist falling back on everything we used to be.

Mike smirks.

“All of my bad habits I learned from you.”

All your good ones, too, don’t forget.

Harvey smirks right back.

“I don’t care what rules we play by as long as we’re playing by the same ones,” he says. “So, how fair do you want this fight to be?”

“Anything that could get us disbarred or put in prison is off-limits.”

Ice closes around Harvey’s heart, paralyzing his veins and dragging him back down, down, down to his lowest end, _Michael James Ross, you’re under arrest for conspiracy to commit fraud,_ and Harvey tries to laugh, tries to remember that awful things can be funny in time, those things that almost killed us can turn into jokes and stories and they can’t hurt us anymore, they won’t keep us up at night if we don’t let them.

“You’re still afraid of prison?” he mocks, because this is funny, this is so funny. “Frank Gallo’s dead.”

“Harvey, I’m serious.”

This is funny, but we’re not playing games.

“All right, you got yourself a deal,” he says as though it’s a concession, or an admission of guilt. “But one thing,” he adds because he can, because he has to: “No crying in your coffee. We end this thing on good terms no matter who wins.”

Mike smiles, reaching out to grasp his hand. “You got it,” he says. “I’ll make sure to accept your loss gracefully.”

Harvey tries to smile back.

No, really.

\---

Time passes like emptying a travel-size bottle of pills; the next deposition, his next chance to see Mike is ages away, an infinite amount of time, until the day it isn’t, the day it’s tomorrow, it’s “Are you ready,” “Are you prepared,” “Is it time for a refill.”

It’s “Mike is playing dirty.”

It’s “Why didn’t you see this coming.”

“Harvey,” Samantha greets him storming into her office Tuesday night. “Good. The deposition is tomorrow—”

“Did you go see Mike behind my back?”

“Yes,” she says, trying to focus his attention on the papers in her hand, “I did, but—”

“Why?”

Tell me it’s something real. Tell me you have a reason. Tell me it’s not what I know it is.

“Because Donna practically begged me to work things out with him.”

Because Donna can fix anything. Donna knows what’s best.

“Samantha,” he fumes, “I didn’t take this case to lay down. I took it to win.”

“Then what are you getting so worked up about?” she demands as though this is his fault, _his_ mistake. “Because I didn’t lay down. I slapped them both with a defamation suit, which is exactly what you would have done if you had seen that ad.”

You don’t know a goddamn thing.

“It isn’t what I would have done,” he snaps, “because I told you, I know him, and he didn’t fly all the way out here just to get slapped with a suit he could have seen coming a mile away.”

“You know what,” she retorts, smacking the files down on her desk, “I’m getting a little tired of you telling me I can’t handle this kid.”

Handle him. Who can handle Mike Ross, who knows how to manage that loose cannon? Who can take him on, who can meet him where he stands?

Who’s been there since the beginning?

“Well, that’s too bad,” he says, “because until you filed the suit the only questions they were asking were about Jeremy’s contract. Now, they’re going to ask about our manufacturing conditions.”

“And that doesn’t matter,” she says, “because we didn’t do anything wrong.”

How can anyone be so blind? So stubborn, so narrow-minded?

Like it or not, this is what you have to do.

Harvey clenches his teeth.

“Don’t you get it?” he demands. “We don’t have to have done anything wrong. He just has to make it look that way to a jury.”

Finally, finally, she sits back on her designer couch, lowering her gaze, avoiding his anger, his righteous fury. The sudden realization as all the pieces click into place, and you see, I told you, I told you not to put yourself in the middle of this fight.

“Shit.”

He narrows his eyes. “That’s right. So you and I are gonna stay here for as long as it takes to figure out how to get out of this.”

You made this mess, you clean it up.

“Wait a second,” she says instantly. “If his goal is to play his violin in front of a jury, all we have to do is make sure they never get to hear it.”

Evade, evade, evade.

Harvey frowns. That’s not how Mike would’ve done it.

But we’ll take what we can get.

\---

Wednesday morning, they don’t meet in Harvey’s office. Wednesday morning, Mike isn’t waiting, he isn’t eager, isn’t impatient. Wednesday morning, the stakes are down, and this is real, taking on a shape all its own, and there’ll be no unringing this bell.

Harvey walks to the conference room with his head held high as Mike walks toward him from the opposite direction with a matching mask on his face, matching battle lines under his feet.

“Coming to beg for mercy before I rip your guy apart?” Mike greets him.

Harvey takes his place on the field and meets his gaze with all the confidence in the world. “No, I’m coming to give formal notice of our decision to waive a jury trial.”

This is just another day at the office.

Mike frowns. “What?”

“I’ll use tiny words so you’ll understand,” Harvey chides. “This case is going to a judge and only a judge.”

“This is bullshit.”

“What’s bullshit,” Harvey returns, “is you’re gonna make it seem like my client exploits his workers.”

“That’s because he does,” Mike insists as though this is his fight, as though he’s doing anything here more noble that seizing a chance to take Harvey down. “Those working conditions are miserable.”

“And that’s exactly the kind of sob story you were gonna play for a jury.” Harvey raises his eyebrows, and here’s another lesson for you, Mike, here’s something you should’ve learned by now. “Well, we took that bullet out of your chamber, so why don’t we call this off and you don’t have to embarrass yourself in there?”

“No,” Mike says curtly. “We’re not calling anything off because while a jury might never hear it, I’m gonna make that motherfucker answer for what he’s doing.”

Harvey keeps his head up and follows quietly.

Mike sits on the near side of the table by himself, in front of his notes and his records and his briefcase. Harvey sits beside his client, watching the midmorning sun cast a blurry reflection of the furniture in the glossy surface of the table before them and ignoring Samantha’s efforts to catch his eye, and Haskins sits back in his chair without a care in the world.

“Mister Haskins,” Mike says promptly, already fired up before they’ve even gotten going. “How many people work in your factories in China?”

“Approximately two thousand,” Haskins says, and Harvey knows immediately that the guy’s never thought about the human ramifications of his actions for a single second as long as he’s lived.

“And are you aware that those two thousand people work twice what they’re supposed to?” Mike charges.

“That’s a fabrication and there’s no record of it,” Samantha says primly as Harvey wonders how exactly Mike wants to quantify the amount of work a person is supposed to do, the number of hours that tip the scale over into “too much.”

A hundred hours a day.

There’s no such thing.

“You want a record?” Mike spreads his hands. “These people make less than twenty cents an hour. You make twenty million a year. How do you live with yourself?”

“Every company makes clothes the same way,” Haskins recites in the same tone he’s used every other time some eco activist has tried to get under his skin for the carbon emissions his factories put out, every time some human rights advocate has come knocking at his door for abusing his worker bees. The same tone every C-level uses when he gets dragged up in front of the House Committee on Financial Services, every time some starry-eyed ingenue gets it in their head that they’re gonna change the world.

“Is it perfect?” he preempts the next barb. “No, but we can’t compete if we don’t do the same thing. And we’re not violating the terms of Jeremy’s contract.”

“No,” Mike mocks, folding his hands on the table and leaning in, “you’re just building an empire on the backs of women and children.”

“Are you kidding me?” Samantha says incredulously as Harvey watches them all waste their time for his amusement.

“Don’t you say that,” Haskins says. “No children are involved.”

Wait a second.

“So it’s just women, then?”

“You’re twisting my words,” Haskins blusters. “We break no local laws, no international laws—”

“And yet,” Mike ponders, “conditions are so fucking bad that two people have killed themselves in the last two years.”

“God dammit,” Haskins shouts, “I don’t care how many people have killed themselves! This has nothing to do with my company! We abide by the law.”

Shit.

Well, at least he put up a good front for a little while.

“Are you done?” Harvey takes the opportunity to drone as Mike and Haskins lean back and refuse to look each other in the eye. “Because you can get emotional, and he can get emotional, and you still have no evidence, no jury, and no case. And I don’t have to remind you that this testimony is not to be revealed outside this room.”

Mike tightens his lips, and Harvey watches the synapses firing in his brain, the gears turning and the pieces fitting together and coming apart as he rearranges his plans, as he makes snap decisions and adjusts his steering wheel along the jagged track.

Put on a brave face for the camera, kid, but you can only prepare for so much.

“And tomorrow morning,” Samantha concludes with her favorite cocky attitude, as though Harvey didn’t have to salvage this win from the mess she made not twelve hours ago, “we go to a judge, and then I send you back to wherever you came from with nothing but your crocodile tears and a big fat loss.”

Mike meets her gaze coldly, glaring at Haskins like he’s imagining ripping him apart where he sits, and Harvey waits for someone else to be the first to stand.

\---

Once Mike has gone away, once Haskins has gone back to running his craven empire, once Samantha has gone back to her office to strut and fret about in search of an audience, Harvey gets in his town car and rides to Three Thirty East Thirty-Eighth Street, fourth floor, apartment four-oh-seven, because they made a deal, they shook on it, and now it’s time to pay up.

Lowering his eyes to the ground, he holds his fist up and takes a second to knock, and Mike takes a second to open the door, and maybe this was the wrong idea.

“Harvey,” he says brightly before confusion clouds his face. “What are you doing here?”

Harvey takes a breath. “I’m here to talk about today.”

“Well,” Mike turns to walk into the apartment, trusting Harvey to follow, “if you’re looking for a settlement, our original offer stands.”

“‘Original offer’?” Harvey parrots, reflexively closing the door as he walks in after Mike the way he’s done a hundred times before. “Were you in there? You got your ass kicked. I’m just here to make sure we’re still good.”

Mike slips his hands into his pockets, leaning back in just such a way as to make his shoulders look broader even though it means he has to look up to meet Harvey’s eyes.

“You haven’t seen it, have you?”

Harvey frowns. “Seen what?”

Bending over the coffee table, Mike picks up an iPad and fidgets with his tie. “Jeremy had an interview scheduled for today,” he says, walking around to meet Harvey where he stands, “but there was, uh— Well, there was a last-minute wardrobe change.”

“I don’t care how many people kill themselves,” Jeremy’s t-shirt reads, “we abide by the law. Brick Street Athletics.”

“Guess Russell Westbrook isn’t the only one who can make a fashion statement,” Mike says as though Harvey should be _proud_ of him, as though Harvey should _cheer_ for him. As though he’s done something right, as though he’s pulled his ace in the hole, as though this was his plan from the start.

Didn’t I do good? Aren’t I so clever?

Aren’t we having fun?

“Damn it, Mike,” Harvey says sourly, “that deposition was under seal.”

“So sue me,” Mike offers. “But, if you do, it starts a whole new case, which means we get another shot at our jury.”

“And if you think I won’t have you sanctioned for this—”

“Go ahead,” Mike says smugly as he sets the iPad back on the coffee table and settles himself on the couch, “‘cause this is already going viral. The more Brick Street tries to stop it from getting out, the more people are gonna see it, so I suggest, Harvey, that you just tell them to give us what we want.”

Harvey presses his lips together as his breath begins to shorten.

This isn’t right. This isn’t right at all.

Nothing that could get us disbarred, Mike, isn’t that what you said? Weren’t those the rules, wasn’t that the deal? Isn’t that what I signed up for, isn’t that what we were getting into with our eyes wide open?

“I don’t get it,” he says, shaking his head as all their plans, all their lofty ideals and promises of fair play begin to crumble, begin to shatter and bruise. “You went to _all_ this trouble just to get him out so he would sign with a competitor?”

“Well, I’ve got some news for you, Harvey,” Mike declares, indulging in his own brilliance and the opportunity to finally, finally lay out the game he’s been playing all along. “He’s actually not looking to sign with a competitor. He’s looking to _be_ the competitor.”

“He gets the money from his contract to put into his company,” Harvey realizes with a scoff. “Free advertising from a public feud.”

“And maybe he changes the way things get done in the process.”

The eternal optimist.

Harvey pretends to smile.

“You helped him plan this thing from the beginning, didn’t you?”

“Well—”

“How the hell did you pull that off?”

How could you do this to me? After everything I’ve given you, after everything you’ve taken?

“It was easy,” Mike reveals giddily, looking up at Harvey with his wide blue eyes so full of heartfelt innocence, still so eager to please after all this time, all the things they’ve said and done. “You see, I knew that you would play the man, but the thing is, the version of me you thought you were playing, he doesn’t exist anymore. The new Mike cares more about the results than he does about playing the violin.”

All your bad habits.

What about the good ones, too?

“Gotta give you credit, Mike,” Harvey says gamely, shaking his head as he goes to sit in a chair a little off to the side of the couch. “But you couldn’t have done any of this if you hadn’t learned so much from me all those years.”

Don’t forget me, if you would.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Mike jumps in, waving his hands. “Are you actually taking credit for my win when you lost? Let’s be very clear about something here, Harvey. Right now, you are the governor of Loserville, and I am the mayor of Winnertown.”

I should be happy for you. I know it.

I am, I am.

Harvey tries to smile.

“You know mayor’s below governor, right?”

“Not in Winnertown, he isn’t,” Mike assures him.

“Mike, enjoy it while it lasts.” He feels the smile reach up to his eyes, even though it doesn’t quite stretch his mouth into the right shape. “Next time, you won’t have the element of surprise.”

“Who said there’s gonna be a next time?”

Please don’t tell me this is the end. Don’t tell me this is all we have.

“What do you say we get a drink?” Harvey scrambles for some way, any way to keep this going, just a little bit longer. “You, me, and Donna?”

Mike lowers his gaze to his lap as his smile shrinks down.

“Yeah, that sounds nice, Harvey.”

No, really.

\---

The morning is molasses, thick and slow-moving and sweet with sour notes underneath. Harvey walks with a drop in his shoulders, a heaviness in his chest dragging him down, but no one’s bothered to ask if he’s doing alright, so he must be pulling it off well enough.

At some point or another, one of those hours where the sun is still out, still shining through his window from above, he walks into his office to find Samantha standing with her back to the door. She turns with a horrified look on her accusatory face, and he stops to wait for whatever wrong the world has done her now.

“Did you see that video?”

He nods, because they can only be talking about one thing. “I did.”

“That asshole set us up,” she bites out. “And you know it. Well, I’m not letting him get away with it.”

Can’t you see that he already has?

“Samantha,” he says wearily, “he beat us fair and square.”

Can’t you see that I don’t want to fight this fight anymore?

“Bullshit,” she retorts, “he planned this whole thing in advance. A clear violation of Jeremy’s contract.”

He shakes his head. “And knowing Mike, we’ll never prove it.”

Can’t you see that I can’t bear to lose it all again?

“Careful, Harvey,” she mocks, crossing her arms. “You’re starting to sound like you’re proud of him.”

“And what if I am?”

“Then get off the field,” she says, angling her hips as she steps from one foot to the other, “because one of us isn’t finished fighting.”

You never belonged here in the first place. I told you, I told you not to get involved.

I tried to warn you.

“I told you,” he repeats, “there’s no way we’ll prove it.”

She shrugs minutely. “Then I’ll make proof.”

What?

“No, you won’t,” he says disbelievingly. “Are you paying attention to what’s going on around here?”

“If you’re talking about Faye,” she says, “Mike Ross isn’t the only one that can do things without leaving a trace.”

“Samantha, I told him we wouldn’t do anything like this.”

I’ll keep my word if it kills me, because someone has to.

Someone has to stand for something.

Someone has to be willing to go down for this.

“And you told me you wanted to win.”

She marches toward him, on her way back to her own office to fabricate god knows what, and whether it’s self-preservation, whether it’s some deeply ingrained instinct to protect Mike Ross at all costs, whether it’s just being so fucking fed up with all her fickle bullshit, Harvey edges to the right, just enough to get in front of her.

She looks up at him as though the world moved to place him in her path instead of the other way around.

“Get out of my way.”

“No,” he says. “You’re letting this go, and that’s an order.”

Her eyes narrow minutely, probably an unconscious gesture more than anything. “You don’t give me orders.”

“I do now,” he decides. “You do this, you’ll _wish_ you had problems with Faye.”

Harvey Specter looks out for his own.

That’s what goddamn loyalty is.

Rolling her eyes, Samantha turns away as though she can lunge around him if she moves fast enough, or beat him down if she takes him by surprise, restraining herself at the last second to merely stabbing her finger into his chest. “Then _you_ are taking this loss,” she says petulantly, “not me.”

Her point made, more or less, she sashays around him and out his office door, and Harvey stands where he’s been left in the middle of the floor, looking out the window without making out any of the body of the city. It’s all the same, of course, the same as it’s been all these years, the same as it’ll be for years to come. The thicket of downtown Manhattan, bright lights reflecting off of all the things he can’t see and illuminating the buildings he can as though they’re something special, something new. The East River, if he bothers to walk around to the other side of the floor and look across the way at Brooklyn, the place where this all began, if he really thinks about it.

This is his loss. Yeah. Alright.

No need to rub it in.

\---

The world is an easier place to live at night.

In the dark, after work is done, when everyone can get back to their real lives and pretend for awhile that the things that worry them aren’t real, when everything stops being overwhelming for a few hours until the sun comes up, Harvey waits at his condo for Mike to come visit as Donna pours wine and arranges cheese and grapes on a tray. A friend is visiting from out of town and they’re having him over for drinks before he goes back home, that’s all this is. Everything fits into boxes and everything makes sense.

“I’ve gotta say,” he admits to Donna, surveying the moderately impressive spread, “you were right. This is much better than going out.”

“Thanks,” Donna grins. “Of course, when I suggested it, I didn’t mean that I would be the one to go to the grocery store and the cheese shop and the wine place.”

“To be fair,” he says, “I do buy my own toilet paper.”

“Which we would have had to use as napkins if I hadn’t also picked up napkins,” she says, pointedly picking up a stack of paper napkins and presenting them toward him.

Mercifully, he’s saved from having to further defend himself by the sound of the door opening. “Thank god he’s here. Hey!” he says as he rounds the kitchen island toward the foyer with a sedate smile on his face. “You want some cheese?”

Mike storms into view, his tie loosened and his shoulders drooping, and Harvey is reasonably certain that wine and cheese is absolutely the last thing on his mind.

“What the hell did you do?”

Harvey furrows his brow. “What are you talking about? I didn’t do anything.”

“You bribed Charles Hu to say I contacted him a year and a half ago with a scheme to break up Jeremy’s contract,” Mike accuses, “and I can’t dispute it because we’re on the record saying the guy’s a saint.”

God fucking dammit, Samantha.

Harvey shakes his head. “Mike,” he says tautly, “listen to me, I had nothing to do with this.”

“Bullshit!”

Bullshit?

There was a time, not so long ago, when Mike would have swept into his apartment full of righteous fury, ranting and raving and working himself into fits over some terrible injustice in desperate need of fixing, some poor group of schoolchildren or nurses or whatever being fucked over by the corporate overlords and he needed Harvey to rescue them, because Mike is a good person, god dammit, and he’ll save the world or die trying, and Harvey would never let that happen.

There was a time, not so long ago, when Harvey would have been the one to solve everything.

There was a time, maybe too long ago, when Mike would have trusted him when he said no.

“It’s not bullshit, Mike,” Donna chastens. “He’s telling the truth.”

Mike deflates a little, clambering for another foothold because he was right when he came over here, he was right to be furious at the man who’s never tried to do anything but what’s best for him. He was right to assume Harvey had turned on him suddenly, wasn’t he? Wasn’t that the truth?

“Okay,” he concedes, “well, if it wasn’t you then it was her. So my question is, what are you gonna do about it?”

It didn’t need to be Harvey.

It just needed to be someone with a name that he knew.

“What the hell can I do about it?”

You can fix it, like you always do. That’s your job, isn’t it? That’s what you’re here for?

“You can say she fabricated evidence,” Mike says, “like she did.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Harvey rebukes. “Do you know what would happen to her?”

Do you have any idea how much I’ve already lost?

Do you have any idea what you’re asking me to do?

“I don’t care!” Mike shouts. “She is cheating my client out of a company that could change people’s lives!”

That’s supposed to be what this is all about, isn’t it? Improving people’s lives? Giving them a chance? Changing things for the better? Isn’t that what we’ve always done, what we’ve always fought for?

“And I’m not gonna sell her out!”

Harvey tightens his jaw for a second and decides to say something he’ll regret.

“Just like I’d do for you if you were still here.”

Mike’s eyes widen disbelievingly. “I don’t believe this,” he says, because they’re all angry now, and all that fury needs to go somewhere. “You’re pissed that I left!”

Now you’ve done it.

“No, Mike, I’m glad that you left,” Harvey snaps, “and you could have come back to visit any fucking time, but you came back to pick a fight with me that you rigged six months ago.”

You could have picked up the phone. You could have answered when I called. You could have said something, you could have said _anything,_ but you decided the best way to storm back into my life was to show up out of the fucking blue to kick me when I’m down.

At least now I know what kind of man you really are, so, thanks for that.

“Oh, so it’s not that I left,” Mike says, “it’s just that I beat you.”

“No,” Harvey corrects, “you almost did. I was gonna let you get away with it, but she didn’t. And I might want to kill her, but I’m not gonna betray her.”

I wasn’t going to get you disbarred or thrown in prison, because we promised. Right at the start, that was what we said, and I can’t break my word to send another earthquake tearing through everything that used to keep me grounded.

“I don’t care about her!” Mike shouts. “I care about _you._”

Do you?

Do you really?

Are you sure that wasn’t an accident?

Mike looks at him like he’s waiting for an answer, some agreement or understanding, but if he’s looking for Harvey to pull him back to shore this time, he’s got another thing coming.

“You gave me your word,” he says then, “and the Harvey I know wouldn’t break his word and screw over a bunch of innocent people in the process.”

We’re not the same people anymore, didn’t you know?

Isn’t that what you said?

“Mike—” Donna tries, but he doesn’t seem to hear her.

“You’ve lost yourself, Harvey,” he snarls, “and you know it.”

Halfway through the accusation, he’s already on his way back in the direction he came, maybe sickened by the sight of Harvey, the very fact of him, and he slams the door on his way out, just to be extra sure they know he’s gone.

Maybe this time, it’ll take. Why bother coming back to someplace you don’t fit in?

Why bother coming back to the place where you left your broken toys behind?

Back to zero.

\---

At night, when everyone’s had the chance to go back to their real lives and pretend all their worries are imaginary, it makes all the sense in the world that Samantha would still be at her office. Her special place to dictate things she has no business being involved with in the first place, her throne to sit on passing judgments about things she doesn’t understand.

Harvey stalks in, prepared for a bloodbath.

Samantha looks up as though he’s intruding.

“Harvey—”

“No,” he spits, “you’re gonna listen to what I have to say, because you lied to me.”

“I didn’t lie,” she says placidly. “I changed my mind.”

“Bullshit.”

“You’re right,” she retorts, standing and dropping the file in her hand on her desk just as surely as she drops her civil pretense. “It is bullshit, because I don’t take orders from you, and I tried to tell you that and you wouldn’t listen. So I did what needed to be done.”

As though she has the moral high ground here. As though she knows what’s best for all of them, for any of them. As though she knows what’s best for _him._

“And you put us both at risk,” he says, “because if Faye finds out—”

“She’s not gonna find out,” she insists. “All I did was produce a piece of evidence that proves _exactly_ what we know he did.”

If you’re going to lie to yourself, you could at least have the dignity to admit it.

“You didn’t produce it,” he says, just in case she doesn’t know the difference. “You fabricated it because you can’t stand someone getting the better of you.”

“I can’t stand someone ripping off my client,” she corrects, as though that’s what this has all been about, as though she isn’t taking this personally, as though this whole time she hasn’t been trying to piss all over this territory she invaded just to scare Mike away. “So what are you really upset about? The fact that I crossed a line, or that I beat your little adopted son?”

As if you don’t know. As if this isn’t what you wanted all along.

“Samantha,” he hurls her name like a curse, “Mike came at me and I defended you, because that’s what partners do. Well, that’s all over now, because I don’t trust you anymore.”

Turning away, he retraces his steps out the door, trusting his feet to guide him along the worn path as his vision blurs red, as his chest tightens against the reminder that most things that are rough on the outside are rough on the inside, too, that taking a gamble on someone’s motivations being sweet and pure is naïve and stupid, that he’s better than that.

He is.

No, really.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Mike, that’s great. I’m happy for you.”  
“Still up for being my best man?”  
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”  
—Harvey and Mike, “Teeth, Nose, Teeth” (s06e13)
> 
> “Is there a chance that you’re overreacting to Mike having just left?”  
“I don’t know, Donna. But to tell you the truth, I don’t care.”  
—Donna and Harvey, “Right-Hand Man” (s08e01)
> 
> “Because they leave. Everyone leaves: Mike, Rachel, Jessica, my sister-in-law.”  
—Harvey, “Cats Ballet Harvey Specter” (s08e06)
> 
> “If you wanna do more pro bono cases—”  
“That’s not the point, Harvey, and you know it. This is who I am. It’s who I’ve always been. It’s time, Harvey. It’s time.”  
—Harvey and Mike, “Good-Bye” (s07e16)
> 
> “But everything Mike did from the second he met you was to save your company. Because when it comes to caring about people, he’s twice the man that I am. And by the way, he never gave up on you and he never sold you out.”  
—Harvey, “This is Rome” (s04e10)
> 
> “School. It’s where our kids are taught and nurtured. And it’s supposed to be their safest place. But for the families of Treetop Elementary, Discharge Power took that safety away when they built a battery plant 1,000 yards away from their playground. Now, they’re gonna say they took the proper precautions. They didn’t. And now hundreds of innocent children are suffering the devastating effects of lead poisoning, and they will never be the same.”  
—Mike, “Good-Bye” (s07e16)
> 
> “It’s not right.”  
“It’s not right? I drank three Gatorades on the way here. I’m going to pee orange. It’s right.”  
—Harvey and Mike, “High Noon” (s02e10)
> 
> “What does it matter how much money I spend on suits?”  
“People respond to how we’re dressed. So, like it or not, this is what you have to do.”  
“Oh, that’s weird. You’re giving me advice? It sounds like you actually care about me.”  
“I don’t. You’re a reflection of me, and I absolutely care about me. So get your skinny tie out of my face and get to work.”  
—Mike and Harvey, “Pilot” (s01e01)
> 
> “Look, you were giving me shit this morning because I come and go when I want to. You know why I can do that? Because when I got here, I dominated. They thought I worked a hundred hours a day. Now, no matter what time I get in, nobody questions my ability to get the job done. Get it through your head. First impressions last. If you start behind the eight ball, you’ll never get in front.”  
—Harvey, “Tricks of the Trade” (s01e03)
> 
> “Listen to you? You know when I would have listened to you? That night. Jessica threatened me.”  
“I don’t care. Anyone comes at you with any threat at all, you come to me. I don't give a shit if it’s the Queen of England. You come to me. You tell me. You tell me everything. That's what goddamn loyalty is.”  
—Mike and Harvey, “The Arrangement” (s03e01)
> 
> “Do not trust it.”  
“Don’t trust a pineapple?”  
“Hardman. You.”  
“Come on.”  
“I don’t want it.”  
“Are you serious? You’re afraid of the pineapple? I know it’s got a rough exterior, but it’s all sweet on the inside. I promise. Come on. ‘I love you, Harvey.’”  
—Harvey and Mike, “The Choice” (s02e02)
> 
> Feel free to say hi on [tumblr](https://statusquoergo.tumblr.com)!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Small samples of dialogue in this chapter are adapted from “[Whatever It Takes](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s09e06)” (s09e06).

At night, when there’s nowhere to hide from the monsters whispering in his ear, no bullshit distraction he can pour his energy into pretending is the Most Important Thing, no chaos to hide behind as he quietly loses his mind, Harvey lies in a bed that no longer feels quite like his own, under the arm of the woman who’s professed herself to be his fiancée, and closes his eyes to visions of a yawning stretch of sea covered in cinnabar-colored flowers and dead branches.

This world sure is a funny place.

Harvey lays his hand on Donna’s shoulder as she sleeps beside him, and tells himself to be happier.

The pieces are all in place for it, aren’t they? The cards are all in play; he’s got the girl of his dreams, all the money in the world, a job he’s worked hard for that feeds him new challenges every single day. That’s what everybody really wants, isn’t it? Surprises to keep things fresh, to keep him at the top of his game, and somewhere comfortable to rest his head, somewhere safe to fall back when it all becomes a little too much. Sure, things are a little rough right now, but they’ll get through it. They always do.

This is the only life you’re going to get. You might as well enjoy it.

Harvey closes his eyes and watches a black butterfly darting across the bottomless ocean.

\---

“Harvey!”

Wearily raising his head, Harvey finds Louis standing across from him, back a ways as though he’s afraid of being attacked if he crosses some invisible line.

“Sorry,” Harvey mutters. “I didn’t get much sleep last night. What is it?”

Louis’s face takes on a lascivious quality as he settles back on his haunches and quirks his eyebrows. “Too much time playing the noble stallion for your gentle mare?”

“What is it with you and horses? No,” Harvey says, pressing his hand to his forehead, “I just have a lot on my mind. What do you want?”

Permission granted, Louis closes the gap between them and presses his fingertips to Harvey’s desk. “Our plan,” he says, “to get rid of Faye and get Samantha her job back, how could you have forgotten?”

Harvey massages his face as a headache begins to throb above his temples. “I didn’t,” he says. “I’m all in. What’s our first move?”

“There’s no way Faye’s record is as spotless as it looks,” Louis says. “Her first day here, Gretchen said that she fired her own husband for unethical behavior, so I say we start there. If anyone knows what’s in her past that she’s trying to hide, it’s him.”

Fair enough. Harvey nods, pinching the bridge of his nose. “So you set up a meeting?”

“That’s the thing,” Louis says sourly. “He’s an insurance salesman now, he won’t take meetings from anyone who’s not a potential client.”

“So buy some life insurance,” Harvey sneers.

Rather than sneer something back, or storm out in a huff, Louis leans forward onto his hands, and Harvey gets a feeling like he’s just eaten something that’s going to make him sick if he’s not careful.

“The divorce settlement is sealed,” Louis says, “so if I’m going to get him to say anything about her, it’s going to have to be by force.”

Harvey narrows his eyes. “So force him.”

Lifting his hands from the desk, Louis looks down at him beseechingly.

“Harvey, you know the whole point of this is for us to be a united front.”

Harvey sighs.

“So what, now we’re brothers?”

Louis purses his lips, and Harvey’s stomach turns over.

“Actually, his specialty is in premarital—”

“No.”

Louis frowns, doing his best to put his entire face into it. “Harvey—”

“_No._”

“But—”

“Louis!” Harvey thunders, standing abruptly enough that his chair skitters back to the window. “I don’t wanna hear it! Either come up with another plan or get the _fuck_ out of my office!”

Rather than roar something back, or retreat in terror, Louis pauses a moment before he lowers his gesticulating arms and relaxes his face entirely, and Harvey might not have a reference catalog of the meaning of every single one of Louis’s weird expressions stashed away in the back of his mind, but he’s borne witness to this particular one enough times to recognize it when he sees it.

Harvey sighs through his gritted teeth.

“What.”

Louis shifts his weight to one side, and there’s no mistaking the concern in his eyes.

“Harvey, what’s wrong?”

What isn’t?

No. No, that was a real question. It deserves a real answer.

Sighing, Harvey gropes around behind his back until he finds his chair, pulling it toward himself and sitting heavily.

Where to begin?

He closes his eyes for a moment.

“Everything’s falling apart.”

Go big or go home, right?

Quietly, Louis sits in one of the client chairs and waits for more. Harvey bites down on the inside of his lower lip and does the best he can.

“First Robert leaves,” he begins as far back as he can remember. “And then Faye shows up, breathing down our necks every minute of the day, and I don’t know how she got it in her head that Faye couldn’t touch her, but now Samantha’s gone, and Donna and I are just— We’re moving so goddamn fast, I can’t…”

Louis leans back carefully. “Can’t what?”

Smacking his palm down on desk, Harvey snarls, baring his teeth. “I can’t keep up!”

Yes.

Aren’t I pitiful?

Harvey falls back into his chair, the shoulders of his jacket hiking up around his neck as he sags down against the backrest.

Go ahead. Go ahead and laugh at this pathetic shell of a man, this former lord reduced to ash, this dusty shadow of his former self. Go ahead and laugh at me for how far I’ve fallen, go ahead and tell me I couldn’t take it. Tell me all my suffering was for nothing, tell me I’m right back where I started, small and scared and surrounded by family and completely alone.

Louis purses his lips.

“Harvey… Did you talk to Mike?”

Harvey waves his hand indifferently. “He was just here last week, you saw him.”

“No,” Louis hedges, “before he left. Did he say anything to you before he went back to Seattle?”

Did he tell me I’d become someone he didn’t know? Did he tell me I’d forgotten how to play this game of ours? Did he tell me I was wrong?

Did he tell me I was lost?

Shaking his head, Harvey pulls himself up and rests his elbows on his desk. “No,” he says. “Not after he came to my place that night.”

That night. You know the one.

Louis nods again, pushing himself to his feet. “Give him a call,” he says. “I bet he’ll be glad to hear from you.”

Harvey snorts. “He hasn’t been glad to hear from me the three times I’ve tried to call him so far.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing.” Harvey cocks his eyebrow. “He hasn’t even picked up. Look,” he says, “it’s fine. We said we’d end things on good terms, he just needs a minute to cool off. Everything’s fine.”

Louis smiles a tiny smile, but it’s okay. Harvey didn’t really believe the words he was saying, either.

“He didn’t say goodbye?”

Harvey puts all his weight onto his arms and sinks into his shoulder blades.

“I’m sure he had a plane to catch.”

\---

Defrauding.

Harvey massages his forehead, even though, for the past few hours, the motion hasn’t really made much difference to the pulsing in his skull. George Richardson was defrauding his biggest clients. George Richardson was lying about himself to fleece a bunch of multimillionaires out of some pocket change. And for what? Nothing much, just trying to fund a bunch of class action lawsuits.

Just trying to change the way things get done.

Closing his eyes, Harvey presses the heels of his palms to his brow. Doing the wrong thing for the right reason, how many times has he heard that one before? It’s all in pursuit of the greater good, it’s one more step on a long and convoluted road toward a brighter future for god knows who. Everyone who wants a bite of that shiny red apple, why not, they won’t all have it in them to care how many people had to be trampled on to get where they are today.

I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man.

He smiles to himself. That must be it.

“Harvey.”

Blinking his eyes open, Harvey looks up as Donna marches into his office with her lips pinched and her eyes narrowed, and wonders what wrong thing he’s done this time.

“What happened?”

She stops in front of his desk and sets her hands on her hips. “Louis told me you went to see Faye’s ex.”

He sighs, leaning back in his chair. “Yeah, what about it?”

“I know you don’t want to hear this,” she warns, “but I think that’s a bad road to go down.”

“We got something,” he counters, “so at least it’s going somewhere.”

“Harvey,” she enunciates, “you’re digging into her personal life and she is going to go ballistic when she finds out.”

“Donna,” he retorts, “this is the only suspicious thing anyone can find that she’s ever done. We can’t ignore it; we don’t have anything else, we might as well tell Samantha to make herself comfortable where she is because we’re never getting rid of Faye.”

Breaking the rules has never bothered us before, why start now?

“You’re not listening to me,” she says, dropping her arms to her sides and balling her hands into fists. “If this goes too far, we won’t have a firm for Samantha to come back to at all.”

“Dammit, Donna,” he snaps, exhaustion draining the color from his face and grating sandpaper over his voice. “What do you want me to do? Samantha lied to me, she fucked Mike over and she got herself fired and now I’m doing everything I can to get her back because— Because that’s what you do for family, that’s what you do for someone you’re stuck with until the bitter end.”

That’s what you do when everything changes. That’s what you do when you didn’t ask for what you’ve got.

Narrowing her eyes to slits, Donna steps back as though he’s threatening to slap her, looking down at him like some hideous foreign object.

“What are you talking about?” she asks. “Harvey, we look out for each other here. Any of us would do this same for you if you were in her situation.”

But you didn’t, did you? I was out there by myself, all alone against my darkest fear, my Frankenstein’s monster come back to beat me down for all the sins of my past, and none of you did a goddamn thing to stop it. None of you did anything to help, you walked me to the edge of the pier and then you shoved me off into the water and asked if I knew how to swim.

He shakes his head and looks away.

“Get out.”

Baffled, she steps forward, and he doesn’t even know why he’s surprised.

“Harvey—”

“I just—” He cuts himself off at a shot, pressing his lips together and closing his eyes, softer this time. “I just need to be alone for a minute.”

She doesn’t go. He hears her sigh, hears her breathe. Sees her pitying gaze, even behind his closed lids.

“Harvey,” she murmurs. “We’re all here for you.”

You don’t understand.

“I know,” he says, because they’re trying. They are, they’re doing the best they can on the roads they’re all walking down.

“I know you feel guilty,” she says. “If there’s one thing I love about you, Harvey, it’s your sense of loyalty, but you don’t have to do all of this yourself.”

Have you listened to a word I’ve said?

“Donna,” he sighs, “please, just…go.”

She pauses, one moment more, and sighs again.

“Promise me you’ll think about what you’re doing.”

He nods a vacant agreement, forgetting what he’s bound himself to the moment she walks out the door with all her usual self-confidence and poise.

The warnings come from miles away.

And where am I now?

\---

“I’ve got something that’ll cheer you up.”

Harvey grits his teeth. If Louis notices, maybe he’ll attribute it to the fact that he’s accosted him in the bathroom rather than waiting like a rational human being for Harvey to return to his office.

“What is it?”

“Harvey, what’s wrong?”

Maybe not.

He shakes his head. “Forget it, what’ve you got?”

Uncertainly, Louis proffers a thin stack of papers. The top one looks like an email chain, but Harvey doesn’t bother to focus his vision enough to make it out clearly.

“Two emails,” Louis confirms, “from Faye to the Bar Association specifically asking to quash any investigation into her husband.”

“And that _worked?_”

Louis shrugs. “Maybe there was some fraternization going on behind the scenes,” he says. “But it doesn’t matter because Harvey, we got her, it’s all there in black and white.”

Black and white. It’s there in black and white. We have to pay attention, we have to follow the lead because it’s written down, don’t you know. It’s words on paper, and that makes it real.

I don’t care what’s in black and white.

Harvey sighs and turns on the tap.

“All right,” he says, putting his hands under the water. “Let’s do this.”

Louis frowns. “Hold on a second,” he says as Harvey turns the water back off and shakes his hands into the bowl. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Harvey says. “Nothing’s going on. Let’s go.”

“Harvey, wait.” Putting his free hand out to stop Harvey trying to walk past him, Louis sets the emails down on the counter. “Did something happen?”

Didn’t you hear me?

“Nothing happened,” he says. “Come on.”

“Harvey,” Louis repeats, “I’ve seen you win enough times to know that this is not what you look like when you do.”

Tightening his face into a grimace, Harvey looks at Louis pointedly. After a moment, Louis hums under his breath.

“He didn’t pick up.”

“Of course he didn’t.”

“So try again.”

“He didn’t pick up because I didn’t call.”

Louis startles at the sudden admission, his entire face transforming to emphasize his shock. “Harvey, you need to talk to him.”

“I can’t,” Harvey says darkly, turning toward the mirror behind the sinks. “I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t— I couldn’t listen to that answering machine again.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t have to,” Louis says. “You said he needed time to cool off, maybe it’s been long enough. Maybe he would’ve picked up.”

Maybe it isn’t just you living in this town. Maybe it isn’t always dark out, maybe you won’t drown if you stray too far from the center. Maybe the other people aren’t just shadows, aren’t just echoes of voices from the past. Maybe you haven’t really lost your way.

Then again.

“Mike is gone,” Harvey says firmly, exhaustion aching under his eyes and pulling his shoulders down toward the floor. “He’s gone and he’s not coming back, and he shouldn’t have come here in the first place, but he did, and I need to deal with it.”

Louis lowers his gaze to the floor, picking the papers back up and tapping the edge against his hand.

Harvey sighs.

“I just need a little more time.”

Louis shakes his head minutely.

“Harvey,” he says, looking up at him, “I don’t think this is going to go away by itself.”

Of course it’s not.

But that’s never stopped us before.

“Alex and Samantha are working on something,” he elaborates. “Maybe whatever they find on Faye will get rid of her first, and we won’t have to worry about it.”

Harvey scoffs at his reflection. “You think they’ve found something we haven’t?”

“I think Samantha has some connections she’s working,” Louis says, “and it wouldn’t hurt to let her try.”

And in the meantime, Mister Specter, how about you get your shit together?

He sighs again.

“Best of luck to her.”

Louis smiles.

\---

At night, lying in a bed that no longer feels quite like his own, Harvey closes his eyes and mistakes his vertigo for seasickness, the subtle hum of traffic out the window for the sounds of the open sea. Donna lies facing him, her hands tucked up under her cheek, her eyelids twitching as she dreams of marvelous things, treasures of the unknown, and he looks at the curve of her bare shoulder, the shadowed paleness of her skin and the dark spill of hair across her pillow, and he tells himself to be happy.

Everything is going according to plan, the plan that they’re making up as they go along. Everything is playing out exactly as they insist that they anticipated all along, wisdom just out of reach coming to them at the most convenient moments.

Harvey dreams of standing in endless white non-space, staring out at the colorless sky, terrified of moving.

\---

Dusk settles over the city as Faye makes her way into Harvey’s office, taking her time and keeping her distance in an imitation of respect that she can’t possibly feel for any of them. Certainly not him.

“Harvey,” she announces herself, “can I have a word with you?”

He looks up at her evenly, offering nothing and asking nothing in return.

“I know you’ve arranged for a plane ticket to Seattle,” she says.

“So what?”

She tilts her head a bit to the right. “I want to know what you think you’re doing taking a vacation at a time like this.”

Shows what you know.

“It’s not a vacation,” he says. “Purely business.”

“Are you telling me the Brick Street Athletics suit isn’t finalized?”

He shifts a little in his chair. “Now why would you think a thing like that?”

She levels him with a glare that brings him abruptly back to the beginning of his tenure at Pearson Hardman, back to the days before Jessica gave up trying to reign him in, to tell him what he could and couldn’t get away with.

“If you think I don’t know you’re going to see Mike Ross, you don’t know me very well.”

Perfectly indifferent, somehow unable to bring himself to feel threatened by her, or anything she represents, he smiles at her and crosses his legs.

“I think I know you exactly as well as I need to,” he says. “And if you think you can scare me out of taking this flight, you don’t know _me_ very well.”

Her jaw flexes subtly as she grinds her teeth, and he watches placidly and waits for her next strike.

“Maybe I don’t,” she says then, “being that I never would’ve thought you the type to abandon your firm at such a critical time.”

Shrugging, he purses his lips haughtily. “We aren’t in the middle of any major cases that I need to be here to supervise,” he says. “I’m sure Alex and Louis can take care of things for a few days.”

“I should certainly hope so,” she says, “but I was referring to you and your partners attempting to find blackmail material you could leverage to get rid of me.”

Oh, you heard about that, did you?

Harvey smirks. “Considering the circumstances, I’d think you’d be glad to have me out of your hair for a few days.”

“Do you understand what you’re doing?” she asks bewilderedly, even though they really ought to be beyond such things by now. “Running a corporate law firm is not like running a lemonade stand, you can’t just dash off for a long weekend because you miss your buddy on the other side of the country! You people have responsibilities to your clients, and you have responsibilities to your associates!”

For a second, he considers pointing out that, assuming the trip goes well, he’ll be a far more effective asset to the firm upon his return than he would be without having gone in the first place, being of restored peace of mind and all that, but she’s probably suspicious enough of his and Mike’s history that he doesn’t need to add any more fuel to the fire.

“With all due respect, Faye,” he says, “you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She stands with baited breath, weighing her options one against the other until the realization sinks in that Harvey won’t be reasoned with, no matter how objectively correct her argument, no matter how valid her concerns. He smiles warmly as she shakes her head.

“When this firm collapses at the end of the quarter,” she says, “I hope you all know that you brought it on yourselves.”

He folds his hands behind his head and leans back in his chair.

“I am the master of my fate,” he says, “I am the captain of my soul.”

She looks down at him incredulously. He smiles with his teeth.

\---

Long after the day has died for night, the trails he’s trying to follow gone cold waiting on his exhaustion to give way to a delirious second wind, Harvey turns off the lights in his office, walking down the dim hall and reminding himself that in the end, none of this is truly permanent. The ups and downs, the wins and losses, the breakdowns and the fragile efforts to put it all back together. It all fades away with time.

Downstairs, out on the street, he climbs into the backseat of his town car, beside Donna, who’s waiting like there’s nowhere else for her to be, like things have always been this way, and always will. Donna smiles, and Harvey shuts his door, and they ride back to the apartment in an indifferent silence.

She waits to break it until the elevator door opens into his living room.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Harvey walks to the table behind the sofa and pours himself a glass of Scotch.

“I just booked the flight yesterday,” he says. “I’m not leaving until Wednesday, I guess I hadn’t gotten around to it yet.”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

Harvey sips his Scotch and walks toward the windows with a banal smile on his face.

“Apparently I don’t,” he says, “because I didn’t think this would be such a big deal.”

Donna steps forward plaintively. “You’re flying to Seattle to talk to someone you just saw a week ago,” she says, “who, up until then, you hadn’t seen in over a year. Of course it’s a big deal.”

Turning his glass on his palm, Harvey wonders if it’s the same one Mike used when he was here. That would be some kind of coincidence, wouldn’t it.

“‘Someone’?”

She angles herself away from him. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Okay,” he says, “then how did you mean it?”

She presses her lips together, looking at him with anguish in her eyes as though he’s the one being unreasonable here, as though he’s the one breaking the rules.

And so what if he is?

“Harvey,” she beseeches, “you know I miss him too, but he’s gone. He left, and you’ve had more than a year to accept that.”

He takes another sip.

“You aren’t answering my question.”

“I don’t know what I meant,” she snaps, and why won’t he just let it go, why won’t he let her off the hook like he always does, like he’s always done? “The point is that you wouldn’t be flying off to the other side of the country to see Mike if you two had settled things before he left, and if you’re hurting over this, I’d like to know about it!”

No private lives allowed. The Harvey Specter you thought you knew is dead.

“This isn’t about you,” he says to the twinkling city lights.

It isn’t. It isn’t about her. It isn’t about him. It isn’t about Mike.

It’s about figuring out what’s broken, and the best place to start putting it back together again.

He watches her reflection step closer to his. “Harvey,” she says, “you promised you’d tell me when something was wrong. I’m just trying to help.”

“Maybe I don’t want your help,” he says, suddenly irrational, abruptly furious for no real reason except hasn’t this been going on long enough? Hasn’t he borne all his burdens, hasn’t he met all his challenges, hasn’t he climbed every mountain and crossed every desert? Doesn’t he deserve a chance to break in two?

“Maybe Mike was right,” he goes on, “maybe I have lost myself. Maybe I’ve forgotten who I am and maybe finding out what that means is something I can only do by myself.”

Daring to meet the mirror of her eyes, he finds her hurt, her disappointment and her sorrow, and he doesn’t know what to say to make it right again.

That’s okay. That’s allowed.

She laughs softly at nothing.

“I just thought we were a team,” she murmurs. “That’s all.”

I thought so, too.

He takes another step closer to the windows and watches as she holds her arms across her body and shakes her head, and they’re both here, the two of them together, but she’s talking to herself. These words are for her.

“All I’ve ever tried to do is make you happy.”

And look at us now.

He shakes his head and feels the weight of the glass in his hand, the pattern of the grooves across the surface of it.

“You can’t fix everything.”

Slowly, she closes her eyes.

“Maybe I should go home.”

Maybe you should.

Raising the glass to his lips, he drinks the last of the liquor inside.

“If you think that’d be best.”

She forces herself to smile.

\---

Forty-five hours later, Harvey kneels on top of an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar town, hunched over the glossy duvet as his stomach turns, his head spinning with a delirious sort of drunkenness even though he hasn’t had a drop since he can’t even remember when.

You look like hell, man.

Harvey holds his breath until he can’t, until his heaving gasp nearly shatters the windows wide open.

Monday night, he made himself a Scotch. Neat. Donna was there until she wasn’t; then it was Tuesday. And now there’s this.

“_Fuck!_”

Harvey falls into the pillows and clenches his hands in his hair until his scalp starts to burn.

That’s all for now.

\---

All the streets he walks down are one-way, and it’s the weirdest goddamn thing he’s ever seen.

Harvey tries to keep his eyes out for building numbers, tries to focus, tries to remember where he’s going and why he’s here in this ridiculous place so far from home, this place where none of the trees are the right shape, where all the street signs are the wrong color, and none of the hills are steep enough. Mike doesn’t belong in this fake city, this pale imitation of New York; what the hell is he doing here?

Trying to make a home for himself, that’s what. Trying to do everything he’s ever promised he would.

One two zero one Third Avenue.

Harvey looks up at the stone and glass monolith and puts his hands into his coat pockets. Maybe he should’ve called ahead, but it’s a little late for that now.

Anyway, it’s only fair.

The security guard is reluctant to let him up without a point of contact, but he finagles a call up to the fortieth floor with an easily-spun sob story about his wife of twelve years serving him divorce papers out of the blue this morning and gosh he just didn’t know what to _do,_ and yes of _course_ the firm has somebody on staff who can help him out, or at least point him in the right direction, send him up please, thank you, no problem.

The elevator doors open to a sleek white hall that smells of tongue depressors and bottled water, directing him left to PERKINS VENTURE FUND and PERKINS QP INVESTMENTS, right to PERKINS COIE and FORSYTH ROSS. Harvey starts walking as though he’s been here a million times before.

The receptionist looks up at him with a neat little smile on her face, and he puts on his most charming grin and hopes he still remembers how to act like he belongs wherever he is.

“Hi, I’m looking for Mike Ross.”

She looks down at her computer screen and double clicks the mouse. “Name?”

Harvey sniffs as though he thinks this is funny, as though she will, too, in a minute. “I don’t actually have an appointment,” he says. “I’m an old buddy of his from New York, I’m in town on business and I thought I’d surprise him.”

Click, click, click.

“Mister Ross is very busy,” she says sweetly. “I’m sure you understand.”

He nods. Of course he does, of course.

“Yeah, I get it,” he says, leaning in over the desk. “A couple weeks ago, when he was in New York, my secretary told me he tried to get in touch, but of all the rotten luck, I was in court the day that he stopped by the office. We completely missed each other, so now that I’m here, I was hoping to…make things right.”

Don’t ask me for anything more. Please.

Narrowing her eyes uncertainly, she looks back at her computer, and Harvey waits precisely three seconds to reach into his inner pocket and pull out a business card.

“Here,” he murmurs, holding it out to her. “My name’s Harvey Specter, I’m staying at the Fairmont Olympic. Just…let him know I was here, will you?”

He smiles softly, and she bites her lip.

“Let me see if Mister Ross is available.”

Still got it.

“Thanks so much,” he says as she nods, picking up the phone and dialing an extension.

It’s not a _bad_ office, Harvey thinks idly, looking over his shoulder at the framed print on the wall he thinks he recognizes as one of Mike’s. The glass walls remind him of the firm, that open, slightly paranoid ambiance he’s learned to call his own. No secrets here.

Except that everything is gilded in wood instead of metal, and the linen upholstery is white instead of black, and there’s a waiting area with a little potted fern on the side table, and the sooner he can get out of here, the better.

“Mister Specter,” the receptionist says, “Mister Ross will see you now.”

Of course he will.

Harvey smiles again.

“Thank you,” he says. “Uh, which way…?”

“Oh, down the hall,” she says, pointing to her right. “All the way at the end.”

Corner office, huh? After everything, he probably deserves it.

Harvey nods and starts walking.

On the other side of the glass door set in its wooden frame, Mike sits at his fancy black desk writing notes to himself, tapping his fingers anxiously against a thick stack of file folders, and Harvey braces himself and opens the door.

Mike looks up with a smile on his face.

This is what you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it?

“Well, well, well,” he says, setting his pen down and leaning back in his chair. “Speaking of Seattle. But don’t you have some old aristocrats looking to sue their shareholders, or whatever big case you’ve got going on these days?”

Yes I do, he’s supposed to say. Yes I do, but those old aristocrats are going to have to wait.

Because they always have time for old friends.

Harvey laughs brightly.

“It’s good to see you, Mike.”

Mike’s smile slips a little bit.

“Great to see you, Harvey.”

Harvey nods.

So how much of this song and dance are we going to put ourselves through this time? How much of it are we going to pretend isn’t there, how much of it doesn’t matter anymore? How much are we going to wish away?

Mike’s chair creaks a little as he leans forward again.

“Seriously, Harvey,” he says. “What’re you doing here?”

You know.

You do.

Rapping his knuckles against Mike’s desk, Harvey sits at the very edge of one of his guest chairs, his knees jutting forward and his feet tucked against the chair legs.

“We said we’d end things on good terms,” he says, doing his best not to look away. “I wasn’t sure if we pulled that one off, so I figured I’d stop by to double check.”

I need to hear you say it. I need to see the look on your face, I need you to look me in the eye when you promise me that everything is alright. I need you to tell me why you did it.

I need to forgive you.

Mike smiles.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “We’re good.”

So are you happy now?

Harvey smiles back like he can’t help it, a reflex that doesn’t carry much weight. Are we? Are we really? After everything that’s happened, everything we did and everything we said, are we going to wipe away our sins, are we going to patch up our broken selves with coal tar and water and shake hands and say yes, this is enough for now?

If we don’t talk about it, maybe it doesn’t exist. If it isn’t real, maybe it doesn’t hurt.

Harvey sighs through his teeth.

“So how’s everything working out over here?” he asks, hoping he doesn’t sound quite as loud to Mike’s ear as he does to his own. “You got all the pro bono you can handle?”

Mike laughs to fill the silence. “I don’t know what you’ve heard about our reputation in the press,” he teases, “but we’re a class action firm. All our cases are pro bono until we win.”

Nodding slowly, Harvey tries not to imagine how rough those first few months must have been, how touch-and-go it was while they were still getting themselves up on their feet. Everything probably went fine, just fine; they had plenty of seed money, Forsyth must have been prepared. He must have known what was coming.

“So you’ve got everything you always wanted.”

Mike laughs again. “Yeah,” he says, “well, it’s amazing what a guy can accomplish when he gets out of his comfort zone.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice,” Harvey laughs along, his bones set deep with a sixteen-year old’s desperate need to leave behind everything he’s ever known, everything he thought he loved.

The humor fades away naturally, without acknowledgment and without force. Harvey folds his hands in his lap as he leans back in his chair, and Mike sets his arms on his desk and smiles, and the three feet between them might as well be three thousand miles.

The distance of a single phone call.

While you’re here, you might as well take advantage of it.

“Mike, I gotta know,” Harvey says as though this is all part of the game, all part of the fun. As though it’ll leave all their nerves untouched, all their wounds unsalted. “If you planned the whole thing from the beginning, if you’d been working it out for six months before you even filed…”

Mike keeps smiling his little smile, and Harvey licks his lips as though it’ll keep his mouth from going any drier.

“Why’d you do it?”

Mike quirks his eyebrows, his smile fading a little bit as he tilts his head. “Do what?”

We can never just say what we mean.

“You know,” Harvey prompts. “Coming into my office after the deposition, laying out the rules like that. ‘Anything that could get us disbarred is off limits,’ and then pulling that stunt with the t-shirt.”

Pausing a moment, Mike’s head quivers in a spasm of a shake, a tiny motion as his smile twists incredulously.

“You’d never disbar me for playing the game.”

Harvey digs his nails into his thighs.

Flip the script. Take the gun away. Rewrite the rules. Win your unwinnable situation.

Remember what I taught you, and you’ll be just fine.

“Maybe I should’ve,” he laughs because what else is he supposed to do, what else is he supposed to say? This is all just one big cosmic jest, but it’s fine because Harvey gets it, Harvey’s in on the joke, and it’s _funny,_ it’s _so funny._ And now Mike’s laughing too because _he’s_ in on it, they’re in this thing together, and it’s so _funny_ that things have come to this, it’s so _funny_ that they ended up where they are.

“Come on,” Mike taunts. “After all the shit you pulled to get me into the bar in the first place?”

“Don’t remind me,” Harvey taunts right back. “You know the shit I had to pull to keep you from getting _dis_barred this time around?”

Mike laughs through his weakly parted lips, sinking back into his chair.

You didn’t know, did you? You thought everything was fine, didn’t you? You didn’t have to see the mess you left behind, so who’s to say it was ever there at all?

But I saw. I know.

Harvey smiles.

“Haskins wanted me to eviscerate you,” he recalls, about the same way he would a funny anecdote or a child’s dream. “He wanted me to make sure you’d never work again; ‘feed his license to the dogs, ship his sorry ass back out west, and make sure I never see his motherfucking face again,’ that was how he put it.”

His incisor nipping the swell of his lip, Mike crinkles his eyes at the corners, raising his cheekbones, gathering up all the pieces of his fallen smile without quite managing to put them back together.

“I told him I’d try,” Harvey goes on. “I told him I’d send you back to Seattle, I told him I’d make sure he didn’t have to deal with Jeremy Wall again as long as he lived; I didn’t call the disciplinary committee, but I did call in just about every favor I had in pro sports to get him a contract with Kyler Murray, and that seemed to shut him up.”

Mike laughs uncomfortably, and if Harvey was a kinder man, a more generous man, he would stop talking, he would stop telling his tale of misery and woe. He would stop making himself out to be a martyr, he would stop revealing all the damage Mike left behind. He would let Mike explain, he would let him apologize and he would let him make things right.

If Harvey was a good man.

“Faye didn’t want me to come out here,” he says. “She said at this rate the firm’s gonna collapse by the end of the quarter, and we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves, and you know what, she might have a point.”

“Harvey, you did everything right,” Mike interrupts, even though it’s not true, even though he can’t believe that it is because he’s smarter than that, because he knows better. He’s seen behind the curtain.

“Mike,” Harvey scolds. Mike shrugs.

“Yeah, well, I guess you hired Samantha.”

“You think you would’ve gotten away with it if it wasn’t for her?”

“Like I said, you did almost everything right.”

Harvey starts to laugh, except that just because it’s true doesn’t make it good.

“She was just trying to do the right thing,” he says over the sour taste the words put in his mouth. “You said it yourself, it’s all about the results.”

“I didn’t mean for _other_ people.”

It’s a joke, right? It is. This is all a joke, this is all just…nothing.

Why are you even here?

“So it’s fine if you can get away with it.”

“Harvey,” Mike says, leaning forward like he has something important to say. “I was trying to do the right thing. I was trying to help a guy— I was trying to help my _client_ make the world a better place, I was trying to help him _save_ those people.”

You really don’t get it, do you?

“You couldn’t have done it without fucking me over?”

Mike smirks. “Wouldn’t have come to that if you hadn’t changed the plan.”

Gotta blame someone, huh? It might as well be me.

“I didn’t change any plans,” Harvey points out. “I worked the case I had, I worked the case _you_ brought me.”

Rapping his knuckles against his desk, Mike shakes his head, closing his eyes as he thins his lips. “Alright,” he says wryly, “you know what, let’s just forget it. You fucked up, I fucked up, it’s all in the past.”

The words don’t sound quite so convincing coming out of Mike’s mouth as they did in his head. Harvey frowns, his fingers twitching against his rough woolen slacks and his tongue feeling leaden in his mouth, but he has to ask, he has to know.

“What did you think was going to happen?”

For a moment, Mike doesn’t say anything.

For a moment, he smiles wistfully, lost in a memory, or a fiction, a long-held fantasy, and Harvey waits, paralyzed, quietly suffocating as Mike forgets himself in a world of his own design.

Then Mike smiles, and Harvey doesn’t know how to feel anything at all.

“I thought it’d be like old times,” he says. “You and me, against the world.”

So this is what we do when we’re terrified. This is where we try to hide.

His eyes begin to glaze over, and Harvey hurries to blink before his mind follows suit.

“Don’t lie to me next time, and maybe it could be.”

Mike snorts. “Yeah, I wonder where I picked up that habit.”

Harvey starts to smile again, brittle and thin, and it probably comes out more like a sneer, but it’s just as well.

“What are you talking about?”

Mike picks up a pen and twirls it between his fingers. “Come on,” he goads. “Samantha? One headstrong know-it-all isn’t enough in your life, you gotta find a substitute as soon as I’m out the door?”

Don’t talk about things you haven’t even tried to understand.

Harvey isn’t smiling anymore.

“Mike, you didn’t leave me a whole lot of options.” He leans forward, perched again at the edge of his chair and dropping his hands listlessly between his knees. “You got a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, you had to take it, I get it, but I don’t think you understand what you left us with when you went.”

Looking away, Mike shakes his head cynically. “What I left you with,” he mutters. “I took away the only thing holding you back, I took away your biggest liability.” He turns to Harvey with his shoulders thrown back, all sharp angles and hard edges. “I set you _free._”

“You took away the one thing holding me _up!_” Harvey shouts, lunging to his feet before he can think better of it, before he realizes what he’s doing. “Do you have any idea what kind of shit I had to go through after you left?”

“That’s bullshit and you know it,” Mike accuses, standing to match him, the way they always seem to do. “As _soon_ as I left, you finally got to run your firm the way you want. No more charity cases, no more pro bono, no more legal clinics. You got to be Harvey Specter, the way he’s always meant to be.”

Meant to be?

Harvey’s never been meant for anything. Life comes at him in fits and starts, waves and droughts, and he jumps from one plateau to the next along the path that other people always seem to think it’s their business to set out for him. And why shouldn’t they? He’s never told them any different, he’s never done anything he wanted to just because he wanted it.

Well.

One time.

“Do you even know what happened?” he snaps. “Did anybody tell you? We merged with Robert Zane because we had to, we hired Samantha because he brought her along with him. We made her a partner because he promised her we would, because when someone shows up out of nowhere to keep your house above water for another year, you let him do whatever the fuck he wants.”

Mike scoffs in the back of his throat. “Yeah, looks like you put up one hell of a fight.”

“Are you listening to me?” Harvey falls into the edge of the desk, shoving his face as close to Mike’s as he can get across the divide. “You left us! You left me, all alone, without a single word of warning!”

Mike stares at him, and this isn’t right at all. This isn’t how things were supposed to go, this isn’t what he meant to say.

But now they’re here.

Might as well get to the end of it.

“I did _everything_ for you,” he seethes. “I’ve given you everything you ever wanted, I’ve gone along with every stupid plan you’ve ever come up with. I let you work at that goddamn clinic for free, I let you break your contract when you gave me a fifteen minute notice that you were leaving, I let you come back when all you wanted to do was make me look like an _idiot._ For god’s sake, I helped you get away with it! You don’t know _half_ the debt you owe me, and you’d better hope I never come to collect because I guarantee you, Mike, you’d be paying me back for the rest of your life.”

“Good luck collecting any more than you already have!” Mike shouts back. “I sold myself to you the second you hired me, the second you decided it would be more fun to make my whole life a lie than to do your fucking job.”

“You’re trying to turn this back on me?” Harvey slams his hand down on the desk. “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: ‘Give me this and I’ll work as hard as it takes to become the best lawyer you’ve ever _seen._’ You _begg__ed_ me to hire you and now you wanna pretend that _any_ of this is my fault?”

“If you hadn’t been too scared to face me by yourself, we wouldn’t be dealing with any of this!”

“You got that right! If you hadn’t come back to screw me, I never would’ve seen you again!”

“Fine by me!” Mike bares his teeth like some kind of feral animal, flinging his hand out toward the back wall. “Get the hell out of my office!”

Lashing his arm out across the desk, Harvey swipes a stack of papers all out of order as he stands, turning to throw the door open. A cluster of dawdling associates gathered in the hall scatter at his approach and his stomach turns as blood rushes to his face, burning under his eyes.

A thundering crash rings in his ears and Harvey spins back with his arm raised pointlessly in front of his face, immediately spying the starburst crack in Mike’s office wall, the pieces of a broken rocks glass scattered on the floor and Mike’s arm still outstretched as he struggles to calm his heaving breath, as he does everything in his power to keep from collapsing where he stands.

These things all come full circle, sooner or later.

Harvey sees himself out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Mike, I’m not saying you can’t be furious. I’m just saying, don’t let this be the end of you and Harvey.”  
“I got a plane to catch, Louis.”  
“Safe travels, Mike.”  
—Louis and Mike, “If the Shoe Fits” (s09e05)
> 
> “You write ‘Born to Kill’ on your helmet and you wear a peace button. What’s that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?”  
"No, sir.”  
"You’d better get your head and your ass wired together, or I will take a giant shit on you.“  
"Yes, sir.”  
"Now answer my question or you’ll be standing tall before the man.”  
“I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir.”  
"The what?”  
“The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir.”  
—Pogue Colonel and Private Joker, _Full Metal Jacket_ (1987)
> 
> “Harvey, Mike left.”  
“What does that have to do with this?”  
“It has everything to do with is. Because the reason he left is because he finally came to terms with who he is. And now that he’s gone, who you are is a man who wants back in the game.”  
—Donna and Harvey, “Right-Hand Man” (s08e01)
> 
> It matters not how strait the gate,  
How charged with punishments the scroll,  
I am the master of my fate,  
I am the captain of my soul.  
—William Ernest Henley, “Invictus” (1875)
> 
> “You said I needed to share when I disagree with you, but if we’re gonna make this work, you also have to come to me when something is going wrong in your life.”  
“You’re talking about Faye.”  
“You can’t keep things like her going after your vote from me. Even if you don’t want me to do anything about it, you need to trust me with it.”  
“You’re right. I’m sorry. I’ll try.”  
—Harvey and Donna, “Cairo” (s09e04)
> 
> “And what are your choices if someone puts a gun to your head?”  
“What are you talking about? You do what they say, or they shoot you.”  
“Wrong. You take the gun. Or you pull out a bigger one. Or you call their bluff. Or you do any one of 146 other things.”  
—Harvey and Mike, “Errors and Omissions” (s01e02)
> 
> “All I’m saying is try and create a situation where that’s not even a possibility. Kobayashi Maru.”  
“Koba what, now?”  
“Star Trek. Captain Kirk. He wins a no-win situation by rewriting the rules.”  
—Harvey and Mike, “Play the Man” (s01e07)
> 
> “I don’t like having to do this either.”  
“Well, then why the hell are you doing any of it? We had a plan. Something changed. I want to know what it is.”  
“We can’t talk about it.”  
“God damn it, Harvey, when the hell did you stop trusting me? You know what? You’re right. This was a nice break, but it is over. I’ll see you in court.”  
—Harvey and Mike, “Thunder Away” (s09e09)
> 
> [1201 Third Avenue](http://www.1201third.com/) is a well-known commercial office space in downtown Seattle. Perkins Venture Fund and Perkins QP Investments are subsidiaries of [Perkins Coie LLP](https://www.perkinscoie.com/en/), an international law firm which leases the fortieth floor.
> 
> Kyler Murray is a name I pulled from an article called “[Who Are The Most Promising NFL Rookies For The 2019 Season?](http://www.nflgridirongab.com/who-are-the-most-promising-nfl-rookies-for-the-2019-season/)” He’s a quarterback for the Arizona Cardinals, and apparently he’s quite promising.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you [FrivolousSuits](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrivolousSuits/pseuds/FrivolousSuits) for all of your invaluable assistance!

The ground lurches and cants under his feet as Harvey storms down the sidewalk, giving up hope of holding onto even a shred of poise, a scrap of dignity to concentrate on taking one step at a time without giving into the urge the let his outrage overcome him, to let it pitch him headfirst into the annihilating sky just to see what might come out the other side.

What the hell did he think was going to happen?

A grand, sweeping gesture, a whirlwind to distract them long enough for them to bury the hurt and the betrayal, the anger and regret. The emptiness of promises they have no intention of keeping, the rote insistence that everything is fine now because they want it to be, a bandage on a bullet hole because it’s so much easier than digging out the rot and the decay. Because this is how they work, because this is how things are done in their world. How they always have been, how he thought they always would be.

Sooner or later, they had to run out of road.

Shoving himself through the doors of the Fairmont Olympic, Harvey feels his way along the wall, through the red haze of his vision to the elevators, searching in vain for the button for the twenty-fifth floor before he remembers that this isn’t his home, his sanctuary, his refuge; this is a deceitful place that makes enemies out of friends, and liars out of good and honest men. This place of light drawn with shade, of false pretenses and terrible mistakes.

All he wanted was to make things right again.

Back in his room, climbing over the glossy duvet, he throws his body down into the pillows, hitting his head on the headboard and scarcely noticing the ache in his skull.

How could everything have gone so terribly, horribly wrong?

This isn’t some simple little problem, this isn’t something that’s going to go away because things would be so much easier if it did, because it’s been long enough that time should’ve healed all their wounds. Mike was searching for something when he ambushed Harvey in New York, something he thought he could find by facing him head on, by taking him down; he wanted to prove he was better, he _needed_ to prove it, needed to prove that he can stand on his own two feet out from underneath the shadows of his past. That’s why he left in the first place, isn’t it? To find himself, to prove that there’s a place for him in the world where he can be happy with what he’s doing, happy with who he is.

Turning over onto his back, Harvey glares up at the ceiling. He’ll spin all the psychobabble he wants, but deep down, he knows this has been going on a lot longer than that. Ever since Mike got out of prison, he’s been searching for some kind of purpose in his life, some meaning to ascribe to all the madness that surrounds him; he may have found it for a little while at the clinic, but that was always just a stopgap solution, a bridge between his exoneration and wherever it is he’s going now. The poison Harvey infected him with at the start, hoisting him up into a world of glitz and glamour after a lifetime spent learning how to be grateful for just barely enough, it festered for years before they knew it was even there, before it turned Mike against him, but it’s leeched into his veins now and there’ll be no turning back.

_I set you free._

Is that really what he thinks?

Harvey shoves himself up against the headboard, dropping his arms down on top of his knees and bending his neck forward to clench his hands in his hair. Mike knows his own worth, he knows Harvey wouldn’t have kept him around if he didn’t want to; where’d he get the stupid idea that Harvey’s better off without him?

Well.

Harvey winces as his head smacks back against the wall.

He could always ask.

\---

Harvey’s pace slows as he walks past the massive structure of King County Juvenile Detention, the last gasp of urban sprawl before he’s surrounded by rows and rows of streets lined with split levels and townhouses, a calculated plunge into suburbia that shocks him thirty-five years back to Massachusetts, to a simpler time when the only lie he had to worry about covering up was someone else’s and the only thing he had to do to manage it was keep his mouth shut.

It’s been one hell of a life so far.

Shaking his head, Harvey pulls himself back to the present as he wanders down Twenty-Third Avenue and tries to imagine Mike living in a place like this, this cozy uniformity so anathema to everything he is, everything he’s always been.

Everything he was, maybe. Harvey shouldn’t make assumptions.

He stops in front of a periwinkle blue townhouse and triple checks the number stuck to the doorframe.

Two B.

Harvey closes his eyes. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?

Two seventeen.

Nodding to himself, he opens the flimsy wooden gate and walks down the steps to the front door.

_I never want to see you again._

Harvey digs his nails into his palms. That’s not how it went. And what he said, he didn’t mean it. Neither of them did; this is just how they work, this is how these things go.

This is what they do.

He rings the bell.

No clatter of a moving chair echoes from inside, no thumping footsteps down the stairs. No shuffling of socks sliding down the hall, no muffled cry of “Yeah, hang on!” Craning his neck back to look up at the cloudy grey sky, Harvey thinks about walking away; he thinks about taking Mike at his word, about trusting him to say what he means. He thinks about three thousand miles and three hundred and eighty-seven days, and he thinks that even a friendship forged in fire and lightning can’t stand up to the unerring progression of all things, and maybe he should go before he’s pushed away, never to return.

Out of the silence, the door opens.

“Harvey.”

“Rachel.”

She smiles knowingly. It’s okay; no one ever said this would be easy, but he’s gotta try.

“You’re looking for Mike?”

He clears his throat and looks down at her in her pleated grey dress and her stocking feet, just home from work at the end of a long day. Did she overhear them back there? Does she know the hateful things they said, does she know it wasn’t real? Did Mike tell her how to decipher their secret code?

Does she remember it like he does?

“He around?”

She chuckles under her breath. “Not today. If you want his address, I think I have it around here somewhere.”

His what?

Harvey frowns. “His…”

“His address,” she says patiently. “At Harbor Steps, let me see if I have it written down.”

Turning back down the hall, Rachel starts looking around for her phone, or maybe an address book, and Harvey braces his hand on the eaves above the door.

Mike’s address.

Mike’s not available right now, and if you’d like to leave a message, he’ll probably never hear it.

“Yeah,” Rachel calls, returning from some other room with her phone in her hand, “Harbor Steps Apartments, twelve twenty-one First Avenue, apartment four fourteen, southwest building. Do you want me to text it to you?”

Mike moved out to Seattle to make a new life for himself in the image of everything he ever wanted. Mike moved across the country for a new beginning, a chance to do things the right way, right from the start. The way he’s always played the game, on his own terms.

Is this what they’ve been fighting for all along?

Harvey blinks quickly.

“I got it,” he says. “Thanks.”

She smiles.

“It was nice to see you.”

He smiles back.

“Yeah. You too.”

She closes the door, and he stands under the overhang and looks down at the doorknob, his vision doubling, blurred around the edges. Behind him, a car drives down the road to the left, south; a few seconds later, another drives by in the opposite direction, slowing to turn at the intersection.

This is the world we created together, and now it’s yours to do whatever you like. My gift to you, the freedom to live your life the way you want.

Harvey turns around and walks back the way he came, up the steps and out through the gate.

Was there any point at all to those silly plans we made?

He turns left and walks past the garbage bins, the refuse and the carefully manicured trees, the lampposts all the wrong shape, the streetlights all the wrong color.

He has to talk to Mike.

Harbor Steps Apartments. Pulling his phone from his coat pocket, Harvey types the name into Google Maps and turns around; turn right on E Yesler Way, it says. All the way to First.

Alright.

One step at a time, he paces down the sidewalk to the corner, across the street, following directions on a path he doesn’t recognize to a place he’s never been to meet a man he isn’t sure he knows. But he’ll go where he’s told, he’ll do what he needs to do to make things right, because this is how things work between them, this is how to fix this mess, these lives, how to clean up the ashes and debris of everything they used to be and everything they thought they knew.

He does know Mike, still. He does. Some things have changed, some things he’s missed, but he’s still the same person underneath, the same man Harvey remembers from so long ago. This divorce is just weighing him down, that’s all; Mike’s always been so emotional, his home life always bleeding into his professional one. It’s alright, though; they’re all like that. It’s fine. Harvey knows now, he knows what’s wrong and he can fix it. He can remind Mike to keep these things far apart, and everything will be better.

Harvey looks both ways and walks across East Spruce Street.

He’s going to fix it. He’s going to fix everything.

Somehow.

He is. He has to, there’s no two ways about it.

He will.

East Fir Street.

What the fuck is he thinking?

Mike’s whole life has been moving along out here without Harvey, hidden behind the blackout curtain he’s got strung up between the present and the past. Over a year passed by without a word, a year that must have been full of all sorts of ups and downs and things Harvey would’ve been more than happy to talk about with him, to give advice or lend an ear. All sorts of troubles that might’ve benefited from his years of wisdom, his lessons culled from countless oversights and missteps. But Mike’s getting by on his own, Mike’s perfectly happy starting up his firm, gathering a client base, building up a reputation for himself, living his life all on his own.

And now what.

Now he’s going to burst onto Mike’s doorstep, the grandest of gestures, and tell him what? That he knows what it’s like? That he’s been here before? That he _understands?_

Bullshit.

Mike won’t hear a word of it.

And why should he? What the hell is Harvey supposed to say? “Hey, buddy, my parents got divorced, too, let’s turn on a _John Wick_ movie and crack open a couple of IPAs and forget that our troubles aren’t going anywhere just because we stopped paying attention for a little while.” Why doesn’t he just ask Mike to punch him in the face while he’s at it?

Stepping to the very corner of the sidewalk, Harvey tips his head back and looks up at the darkened grey sky, the constant threat of rain giving way to the tantalizing prospect of a silent night.

Maybe tomorrow will be clear.

\---

In the darkness, lying in a bed so far from his own that it comforts him to sleep, Harvey closes his eyes and transports himself to an alternate universe, a parallel world where the skies are always blue, where Mike’s found what he’s looking for and knows who he is, where he’s never been to prison and Harvey’s never done anything worth repenting for.

It never really occurred to him that things would turn out the way they did.

Shows what he knows.

Pressing his face into the pillows, Harvey tries to sleep in a dark place, surrounded by skeletal trees growing out of the ocean as seagulls fight over bottle caps and empty bags made of cellophane.

\---

It’s a little after ten when he decides to go out, and a little later than that when he finally does, only to be stopped by the concierge mistaking him for someone he’s not and trying to give him the message that Virginia will be buying the flowers herself after all, but thank you for your consideration. Rather than correct him, Harvey asks for directions to Harbor Steps Apartments, smiling politely when the kid tells him to head four blocks down University Street to First, and walking out the door without so much as a word about flowers or special occasions or mistaken identities or anything else.

Two blocks down, Harvey walks past one two zero one Third; he looks up at the fortieth floor, or thereabouts, and wonders If Mike’s gotten into the habit of sleeping in, now that he doesn’t need to worry about biking to the office. Not really, though. Mike wouldn’t waste the time he’s been given.

A lot of things have changed, but not all of them.

Two blocks after that, Harvey holds the door at Harbor Steps for an old woman who reminds him of Mike’s grandmother and slips into the building with a grin and a practiced swagger that stops anyone from asking if he belongs there, even when he needs to pause at the directory to get his bearings and figure out which one is the southwest building. Four fourteen, Rachel said. Fourth floor.

He rides the elevator by himself, and steps out into the quietest hallway in all of Seattle. Maybe Mike will open the door just to slam it in his face.

Maybe. Maybe not.

We’re all out of go-betweens now, buddy. No more excuses. No more pretending that sweeping our shit under the rug is just as good as facing up to our mistakes.

Harvey raises his fist and knocks.

Back in the day, Mike would’ve scrambled to throw the door open so quick he might as well have been waiting on the other side. Back in the day, Harvey would’ve stood with his head held high, come to bring Mike along on some ridiculous adventure and refusing to take “No” for an answer. He’d say something stupid about the building being condemned, and Mike would give him shit and take it in stride and follow him without thinking twice about what a stupid idea it was, and they’d go do something crazy because they could, because why not, because what’s the worst that could happen.

Harvey wonders if it’s worth it for Mike to answer at all.

Then Mike opens the door like ripping off a Band-Aid, like he’s trying not to lose his nerve, and Harvey looks right at him and tells himself not to feel so small.

“Harvey.”

Harvey smiles, just a little.

“Mike.”

Mike leans on his hand, braced against the doorframe.

“I thought you never wanted to see me again.”

I didn’t mean it that way. You know I didn’t.

Harvey puts his hands in his pockets and arches his eyebrows.

“I could say the same about you.”

Mike grins, only partly sincere. “Don’t you know better than to believe anything I tell you?”

You’d think, after all this time.

“Can I come in?”

Mike steps back, and Harvey remembers a time in the distant past when something like this went without saying.

Get over it, would you?

Mike follows him down the narrow hall to the living room and lets him claim the sofa, a secondhand off-white linen thing with rounded arms, and doesn’t say anything while he looks around, coming to understand that this is the way things are now, this is the way it’s all turned out. This is what it’s come to, all those choices they made. Mike lets him sit in the quiet, lets the emptiness fill with the ticking of a clock, an unsubtle metaphor, as Harvey figures out what he’s supposed to do next, where they’re supposed to go from here.

Mike sits down in the black leather armchair across from the sofa and crosses his legs, and Harvey looks at the wall beside the window.

“Mike,” he says. “What happened?”

That’s not too much, is it? I think I could use a friend right about now; couldn't you?

Mike sighs and looks the other way.

“I left to become the person I’ve always meant to be,” he says. “The real me.”

I know. I know.

Harvey looks away from the wall beside the window.

“I remember.”

“Yeah.”

Mike gets a funny expression on his face, and Harvey wishes he would start yelling. Put them back on solid ground, bring them back to a familiar place. Somewhere they can find their way out of.

“Did you know this would happen?”

We’ve done enough yelling for now.

Harvey put his arm over the back of the sofa.

“I didn’t really have time to think about it.”

And whose fault is that?

Mike looks back at him.

“Did you care about what happened to me after I got on that plane?”

How could you even ask me that?

“I’m not the one who stopped returning phone calls.”

Mike laughs to himself. Maybe at himself, or at all of this.

Well, sure. It’s almost funny.

Almost.

“Alright,” he says. “You asked for it.”

Harvey leans back into the cushions and nods.

“I did.”

Okay. Here we go.

“As soon as we got here,” Mike says, “Forsyth had everything ready to go. A house for us, real estate for the firm, about a dozen associates, software, supplies, bank accounts, the whole nine yards. We show up on Sunday, we settle in, we’re good to go first thing Monday morning.”

Harvey nods, even though Mike isn’t looking.

“For a couple weeks, everything’s great,” he says. “The other firm on our floor, they’ve got a class action division, they let us sit in on a case against First Data Corporation, they helped us get our name out there; this guy Steven got in touch with us to sue Optum360 for faxing unsolicited advertisements, we got a six million dollar settlement out of it.”

Harvey smiles a little, and Mike shakes his head.

“But you know what doesn’t bring a whole lot of public attention?” he snipes. “You know what doesn’t bring anyone with a real problem banging down your door? A class action about _annoying __faxes._ A class action about faxes that only comes up with five hundred dollars per plaintiff. The firm, the whole firm made two million dollars for an entire year and a half of work, and you know what a bunch of freshman associates don’t appreciate? They don’t appreciate their boss getting a half million dollar reward for being a fraud when most of them don’t even end up with enough to pay off—ten percent of their student loans.”

Harvey stops smiling, and Mike laughs again.

“Forsyth promised us no one would know,” he mocks, “but it’s not hard to figure it out; there are tons of lawyers in Washington who have_ way_ more experience with class actions than me and Rachel, why the hell would Forsyth go all the way to New York to find us? To find me? It takes, what, five seconds to find the _Times_ article that pointed him in our direction, you think any of these wannabe detectives were gonna let that slide?”

Mike beats his fist against his leg, and Harvey holds very still.

“Half the associates are trying to stand up for me because they want to keep their jobs,” he says, “and the other half are lobbying Forsyth to fire me, and they got it in their heads that this is somehow Rachel’s fault too, for marrying me, for sticking with me for as long as she did, and all I ever wanted was for this goddamn firm to be a success, to help people who can’t help themselves, but instead I’m working myself to death on stupid cases that don’t pay me a fucking salary, ordering around a bunch of arrogant little shits who don’t respect me, who don’t know what they’re doing, while I _dedicat__e_ myself to this place until my wife leaves me because we don’t have any time for each _other_ anymore, because we can’t stop _fighting_ all the time, and now I’m out here, in Seattle, the other— On the other side of the fucking_ country, _trying to figure out how anyone could’ve convinced themselves that a firm that _only_ handles class action suits, a firm that’s run by some asshole who had to lie and cheat and_ blackmail_ the Appellate Division to get his license, is a, is a _sane_ idea.”

Mike’s hands trembling in his lap, and Harvey presses his lips together and leans into the armrest.

You could’ve called, you know. You could’ve called, and I would have tried to help.

I wouldn’t even have asked you to come back.

Mike sighs through his teeth, clasping his hands together as though it might stop the shaking.

“I tried,” he says. “I really tried.”

I know you did.

Harvey bites his tongue.

“So you represented Jeremy Wall for the quick returns?” he asks before he thinks better of it, because that’s a touching story and all, but it doesn’t really explain very much.

Mike’s eyes shine when he looks up again, and Harvey bites his tongue to keep from making things any worse.

“I represented him because it was the first time anyone’d asked me to do the kind of work I thought I’d be coming out here to do,” Mike says flatly. “He found my name in the papers, just like everybody else did, except he didn’t care that I was a fraud, or that I’d lied to the world until I couldn’t get away with it anymore, he only cared that I take cases that help people who need it, and he figured maybe I’d be willing to take a chance on someone like him who just wanted to put a little good out into the world, even if he doesn’t really know how to do it.”

“And the fact that he wanted to take on one of our clients was just a coincidence.”

Oh, dear.

Well, after everything that Mike has said, Harvey figures he deserves the chance for a little retribution.

Interlacing his fingers, Mike presses his thumbs together and looks away. “Not gonna lie,” he says. “I can’t say for sure I would’ve done what I did if it was someone else, but I guess we’ll never know.”

No, we won’t. Isn’t that convenient.

Harvey crosses his legs and lays his arm back across the backrest.

“Tell me why.”

Mike raises his hands in front of his mouth, and Harvey scratches his nails against the off-white fabric at his back.

“I’m alone out here.”

Aren’t we all?

“You could’ve come to me,” he says. He’s been saying it all along, hasn’t he? Didn’t Mike hear? Didn’t he know?

Mike smirks.

Maybe not.

“You were right,” he says. “I left you all alone. I told myself I was doing it for the greater good, I… I thought I was doing it all for a reason, some—higher purpose, trying to make up for everything I’ve done, but— I’m, I’m not a good person.”

Come on now. You know that’s not true.

“Mike.”

“I don’t know!” Mike exclaims, bolting from his chair and turning away. Standing before the window, he holds himself tight, and Harvey waits.

Harvey waits, and Mike laughs a scornful laugh.

“The whole time I’ve been out here fucking everything up,” he says, “trying so hard to be everything I’m supposed to be and—failing, at all of it, all I wanted, all I wanted this whole time, ever since I left, I just wanted to be _you._ I wanted to be the guy everything always worked out for, the guy who got everything he wanted, the guy who could win any case and close any deal, the guy who— The guy who could pick up some good-for-nothing pothead fuck-up without thinking twice, and just—put him back on the right track, and_ make_ something of him.”

Mike pounds his fist against the wall, an impulsive act that doesn’t really mean anything.

“I wanted to be that guy, and this was the only way I knew how, this was…as close as I could get.”

Of course you did. But you and I both know that guy hasn’t been around for a long time now.

Harvey turns toward the window and looks out at the cityscape, the gritty scaffolding of the half-finished high-rise across the street, the buildings so perfectly lined up with their paneled façades, each box waiting to be ticked with a check or an X, yes or no, right or wrong. He uncrosses his legs, and Mike lays his hands on the sill and leans his forehead against the windowpane.

“It was stupid.”

Of course it was.

Harvey presses his hands down on his thighs and stands.

“Yeah.”

Mike laughs like he’s crying.

He’s not, though. But he might.

Not yet.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “About. All of it.”

Harvey ambles across the floor and puts his hand on Mike’s back.

“I know.”

Mike exhales against the glass.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call.”

Harvey rubs the spot between Mike’s shoulder blades.

“Me too.”

We’re doing our best.

His hand settles at the crook of Mike’s neck.

“You know,” he says, “we don’t have to keep doing this.”

Mike laughs sharply. “What, ruining everything?”

Harvey looks out the window, at the graph paper buildings and the cloudy grey sky, and imagines the glitter of the East River, the haunting silhouette of midtown Manhattan from fifty stories off the ground.

It’s been a long night, and we need to take a rest.

“Try to be people we’re not.”

We’re almost there. Just a little bit more.

“I want to go home.”

Harvey squeezes Mike’s shoulder.

“There might not be much of a home for you to go back to,” he says, because they both know it, and it’s stupid to tell themselves that they don’t.

Abruptly, Mike pushes himself away from the window, drawing Harvey along to survey the apartment, the bits and pieces he’s managed to salvage of the life he thought was his, that he saw just out of reach. The secondhand furniture, the dusty accordion blinds, the blank white walls.

It’s not much, is it?

“So,” he says, a little scratchy in the back of his throat. “So I guess I might not be the only one who could use a do-over.”

Harvey chuckles. He’s right, he’s right; after all, when you’ve been to the top of the mountain, when you’ve seen how bleak and cold the view is from up there, all that’s left to do is go back down.

Mike sniffs and clears his throat. “You know what,” he says, “I think the last time I really felt like myself was when I was working with you.”

I know the feeling.

“So that do-over.”

Mike grins. “I wouldn’t mind going back to someplace where everybody’s already forgiven me.”

“You want us to pull a mass exodus?” Harvey hums thoughtfully. “It’s got a hell of a ring to it.”

“Yeah, well.” Mike clasps his hands behind his back. “‘Specter Litt’ was always my favorite.”

“Specter Litt Ross,” Harvey corrects as Mike shakes his head, his eyes wide.

“Not on your life.”

Harvey smirks. “Give it a few years.”

Shoving his hand back through his hair, Mike turns in an awkward little circle, a smile on his face like he’s trying not to laugh.

“I’m not making any promises.”

Harvey claps him on the back.

“I’ll take it.”

We’ve come this far, we might as well go a little farther.

We’ll get there.

\---

As it happens, packing up a man’s entire life to move clear across the country on more than a whim and a pending threat does actually take some doing. For reasons Harvey doesn’t much care to dwell on, Mike still has most of the boxes he used to move out of the townhouse, and it doesn’t take a terrible amount of effort to pack his scant belongings and cart them over to Harvey’s hotel room, but the work is oddly thoughtless and surprisingly dull; as they migrate from the bedroom to the kitchen, the kitchen to the bathroom, Mike doesn’t divulge any hidden meaning behind the queen-size bed or the whimsically duck-patterned shower curtain, and Harvey takes great pains to keep his mouth shut to any questions.

Maybe some other time. Maybe when things are back to normal.

They will be.

Breaking Mike’s lease three months early poses only a minor inconvenience in the form of needing to wait until Monday to speak with the leasing team, and Harvey’s quick assurance that he’s happy to pay off the remainder of the agreement moves the process along without argument, except for Mike’s petulant insistence that he can pay for it himself, which doesn’t really count.

Harvey figures he should’ve seen the next part coming.

“You’re quitting.”

Mike stands firm and nods precisely once.

“Yes.”

Breathing out, long and low, Forsyth leans back in his chair and folds his hands behind his head.

“Is this a joke?”

In the back of the room, looming by the door, Harvey crosses his arms and sets his face in an ominous glower. It should be obvious to anyone in command of even _one_ of their senses that Mike is unhappy with the work he’s doing, but does Forsyth really not know? Can he possibly be _that_ ignorant? Maybe it’s not such a surprise; the guy hauled ass all the way to New York to headhunt Mike, to pilfer him from his firm as soon as he scented a whiff of discord in the ranks, the barest hint of vulnerability. He doesn’t give a shit about anything but his business. And maybe his image.

“No,” Mike says. “It’s not. I appreciate you giving me this opportunity, but I think we both know it’s not working out.”

Forsyth scoffs. “And just who do you think I’m supposed to get to replace you?”

“Rachel,” Mike answers promptly, a practical answer if not necessarily a wise one. “She has just as much understanding as I do of how things work around here, and once I’m gone, she’ll have all the associates on her side, or under her thumb. If _you’re_ willing to pick up some of the slack, the firm will probably end up even better off than it was while I was in charge.”

Harvey frowns at the growing snideness of Mike’s tone. If Forsyth hasn’t gotten it through his head that it takes more than a checkbook to keep his name on the wall, things around here are probably even worse than he would’ve imagined; it’s almost enough to make him want to stick around to watch Rachel whip them all into shape.

Almost.

“I’m sorry, Mike,” Forsyth says, “I’m afraid I can’t let you go.”

It’s a challenge, but Harvey forces himself not to roll his eyes.

“How exactly are you going to stop me?” Mike asks coldly, dropping his remaining pretense all at once as Forsyth shrugs.

“You signed a contract,” he says. “Your leaving would go against the bylaws.”

The _bylaws?_

Louis would have a fucking field day with this asshole.

“The bylaws,” Mike deadpans as Harvey looks on. “How’s this for violating the bylaws: I just took on a professional athlete as my client to sue a B-grade sporting goods company and won my case by airing sealed deposition testimony on national television, a plan that had been in motion for _six months_ before it played out in the public eye. So the way I see it, either you knew what I was gonna do and didn’t report me to the State Supreme Court, which makes you just as culpable as I am, or you didn’t know, but you didn’t fire me when you found out, and if that’s the case, Andy, I have to ask, what the hell _are_ you keeping me around for, anyway?”

Forsyth looks up at him for a minute, his hands folded underneath his chin and his eyes beginning to twitch.

Take that, asshole.

Eventually, he raises his index fingers in front of his mouth, tapping them together like some shitty Bond villain parody, and narrows his eyes. “You’re gonna need to give me two weeks notice.”

Mike cocks his eyebrows.

“You’ve got forty-eight hours.”

His mouth dropping open, Forsyth begins to sputter, fumbling for a response, but Mike merely turns around, his face utterly devoid of expression, and jerks his head as he walks past Harvey, urging him out the door.

Harvey smirks and follows him.

Nicely played, Mister Ross. Nicely played.

\---

Back at Harvey’s hotel room, Mike collapses into the desk chair and shoves his face into his hands.

“Rachel is going to _kill_ me.”

Harvey’s grin falters. “You didn’t talk to her about taking over?”

“I didn’t talk to her about _leaving,_” Mike says. “I mean she knows I’m unhappy out here, she knows what kind of shitshow this has all been for me, but there’s a pretty big difference between knowing I _want_ to leave and getting a heads up that I’m gonna threaten to have Forsyth disbarred if he doesn’t terminate my contract and put her in charge of the whole goddamn firm.”

Harvey sits heavily at the edge of the bed.

“Jesus Christ, Mike.”

“I know,” Mike groans. “I know.”

“What do you think she’s gonna say?”

Shaking his head, Mike throws his hands up into the air. “Hell if I know! ‘Good riddance,’ maybe, or how about, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’”

Harvey smiles gamely. “On the bright side,” he says, “at least this time you’re covering all your bases before you leave.”

Mike glares at him, and Harvey glares right back until Mike huffs a sigh and look away.

Yeah, well.

“Alright,” Harvey says, “how about this: We’ve still got forty-eight hours to kill, you got any good coffee carts around here?”

Mike’s jaw tics in the beginnings of a smirk, and he slowly turns back to look him in the eye.

“And just what are you implying?”

“I think you know exactly what I mean.”

Mike rubs his face and smiles wearily.

“You know it’s legal here.”

“You saying you’ve gone soft on me?”

“So what if I am?”

Harvey looks down at him scornfully. “Mike.”

Leaning back, Mike raises his hands to the crown of his head and closes his eyes. “There’s a food truck about four and a half blocks from here.”

“Good stuff?”

“Good enough.”

“Well, what are we waiting for?”

Mike grins.

“You got me.”

\---

“Dude—dude.”

“Don’t call me ‘dude.’”

“No but dude, Rick Sorkin.”

Harvey takes another drag of pot and squints into the smoky air.

“It was just a joke.”

Groping for the joint, Mike flails his arm around in front of Harvey’s face until he inserts it between his fingers with a fairly impressive level of coordination, all things considered.

“Dude,” Mike marvels, “how did you even _remember_ that?”

Harvey purses his lips thoughtfully. It’s not exactly a difficult question.

“Why wouldn’t I?” he asks. “I know everything about you.”

“Aw,” Mike croons, “you _care_ about me.”

Harvey shakes his head. “I don’t care,” he says. “I win.”

“What do you call flying out to Seattle to, to _make __nice_ with me?”

“Efficiency.”

Mike snorts a loud laugh and drops the joint on the desk beside a pot of pink chrysanthemums. “You know, both our lives would be a lot easier if you’d just admit you’re in love with me.”

Would they though? It’s never seemed to matter much before.

Then again, when’s he going to get another opportunity like this one to finally set the record straight?

“I’m not in love _with_ you,” Harvey corrects. “I’m in love _at_ you.”

Mike’s laughter falls away as abruptly as it came on, his glassy eyes wide and skittering for focus.

Wait…

“You what?”

Oh, this was a bad idea.

Wait, wasn’t it?

Was it?

Harvey waves his hand dismissively. “You never gave me a chance,” he says. “You and Rachel, and me and Zoe, and you and Rachel, and me and—and, and, Paula, the— I, I never had a shot.” He shakes his head and looks out the window. “’S fine.”

“Wait,” Mike says, stumbling out of his chair to sit beside Harvey on the bed, “wait, wait, I— Are you serious?”

What the fuck. Might as well.

Setting his shoulders back, Harvey raises his chin imperatively.

“Do I look serious?”

Mike leans in to peer into his eyes. “You look stoned.”

“I am.” Harvey blinks. “I’m not. I’m both.”

Is he?

Yes. Yes, he is.

Very, very both.

“’Cause I mean,” Mike says carefully, “I’m not with Rachel now.”

That is…true.

“And I’m not with Donna,” Harvey adds.

Mike nods.

“Yeah.”

Harvey nods.

“Yeah.”

Mike tilts his head.

“Should we be, like…making out right now?”

Harvey leans in.

“I’m game if you are.”

Mike angles his chin up.

“I’m so game.”

“Hey Mike.”

Mike grins against his lips.

“Shut up?”

Harvey grins right back.

“Shut up.”

\---

Harvey slips into wakefulness with a remarkably clear head, all things considered; not even the unfamiliarity of the bed seems to have quelled his efforts any, maybe even helping ease through the strangeness of the whole situation. Arching his back against the mattress, his pants rucking up against his hip, he stretches his arms up above his head and glances over at the bedside clock; thirty-three hours down, fifteen to go. That’s not too bad, in the grand scheme of things.

“Hey.”

Mike sits at the desk chair, his phone hanging loose in his grip and an uncomfortable sort of smile on his face. Harvey pinches the bridge of his nose and rubs the corners of his eyes.

“Morning.”

Mike sets his phone down behind him.

“So I talked to Rachel.”

“Oh yeah?” Harvey pushes himself up against the headrest and sets his forearms on his knees. “How’d that go?”

Mike smiles bemusedly. “Better than I thought it would,” he admits. “She said she knows I’m unhappy here, she knows I’m frustrated, and she wishes I’d talked to her about it before I told Forsyth she was taking over for me, but she won’t hold it against me since it’s going to be so much easier for her to run things without me around being all, uh,” he quirks his fingers in the air, “‘hysterically optimistic.’”

Hysterically optimistic. Harvey hums quietly; that’s not exactly the Mike Ross he remembers, but then, it’s been a long time, and they’ve all hidden away in dangerous places to protect themselves from the truth.

“And you still wanna come back to the city,” he says, because he’s sure, he is, but he has to be absolutely certain, without a shred of doubt, and that’s been the whole point, hasn’t it? The point of all of this? That’s where this has always been headed, that’s where they’ve always meant to end up.

Mike drums his fingers against his jeans and shifts his feet across the floor.

“This isn’t going to be easy.”

No. Of course not. But then, what fun would that be?

Harvey looks past Mike, out the window at the quivering treetops, and wonders if the winds in Seattle cut through wool and bone as hard as the ones back home.

“We’ll get it done.”

Mike presses his lips together and scratches the back of his hand.

“You still wanna try—us?”

Oh, so that’s what all this is about.

Sliding over to the edge of the bed, Harvey sets his feet on the floor and grips the mattress to keep from pitching forward as he waits for Mike to meet his gaze, for his breath to stop catching his his throat.

Mike looks up, and Harvey lowers his brow.

“Yes.”

Mike parts his lips uncertainly. That’s all?

Yeah, of course. There’s nothing more to it.

Only a few seconds later, Mike smiles in that relieved sort of way he has, a little bit whimsical, a little bit too trusting, and Harvey smiles back, relaxing his grip to brace his hands behind him.

“We’ve come this far,” he says, “we might as well go all in.”

“You, me, and a stack of chips.”

“I think the odds are a little better than that.”

“Good thing Harvey Specter doesn’t play the odds.”

“You’re goddamn right I don’t.”

Mike opens his mouth as though to carry on the banter, but there’s no real point to it anymore, and it’s a pretty silly way to waste fourteen- or fifteen-odd hours of down time before they have to start thinking seriously about catching a flight back home. Instead he stands from his chair and walks to the bed, collapsing beside Harvey with a loud sigh as though he’s just completed some kind of marathon before he leans into Harvey’s side, the divot of his temple pressed against his shoulder.

“Thank you for coming after me,” he murmurs.

As if there was ever any doubt.

Harvey holds Mike against him and rubs his hand up and down his arm.

“Any time, rookie.”

Every time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “It’s a nice building. How long ago was it condemned?”  
“Oh, great, so, did you come all the way over here just to criticize where I live, or—”  
“That’s a side benefit.”  
—Harvey and Mike, “All In” (s02e06)
> 
> “I wasn’t trying to get you back. I was trying to help—”  
“I don’t believe you!”  
“Mike—”  
“Are you telling me you don’t want me to come back here?”  
“Of course I do, and you can come back at any time, but that doesn’t mean that—”  
“I don’t care what it means. And just to make it absolutely clear, in case there is any doubt, if by some miracle the hand of God touches me and I’m somehow able to practice law again, this is the last place that I am ever coming back to.”  
“Mike—”  
“Stop messing with my life!”  
—Harvey and Mike, “She’s Gone” (s06e11)
> 
> “Let me lay this out for you. I’m looking to start a firm that takes on the big guys without relying on funding from anyone. This is the case that’s going to make that happen. And when it’s over, I want someone to run the place. And that person is you. And before you say anything, Rachel Zane can run it right by your side. But I need a yes, soon. Or I need to move on. I’m staying at the Carlyle. You have 48 hours.”  
—Andy Forsyth, “Tiny Violin” (s07e14)
> 
> “Oh. Oh, you’ve got a sweet place, dude.”  
“Don’t ever call me ‘dude.’”  
—Mike and Harvey, “Tricks of the Trade” (s01e06)
> 
> “This woman had her life ripped apart. You don’t even care?”  
“I’m not about caring. I’m about winning.”  
“Why can’t you be about both?”  
“I’d explain it to you but then I'd have to care about you.”  
“Right.”  
—Mike and Harvey, “Pilot” (s01e01)
> 
> “Are you serious right now? You’re not messing with me? You’re finally going to tell me what you do with that can opener?”  
“Do I look serious?”  
“You look stoned.”  
“I am. But I never joke about the can opener.”  
—Mike and Harvey, “High Noon” (s02e10)
> 
> “You said yourself, you’re not an expert, but you hire them to advise you, run your companies, and fight your battles. Tonight, it’s you, me, and that stack of chips. Let’s play.”  
—Harvey, “All In” (s02e06)
> 
> “I told you this before, I’m going to tell you again. I don’t play the odds. I play the man.”  
—Harvey, “All In” (s02e06)
> 
> Mike’s address at the beginning of _Suits_ (according to his [driver’s license](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/9d/46/27/9d462764d23108304b112eec929a0259.jpg)) is 2B-15 South 9th Street, i.e., building 15, apartment 2B. (The license says it’s in Manhattan, but that address is actually in Brooklyn.) Their address in Seattle is never referenced, so I put Rachel (and formerly Mike) in the [townhouse](https://www.apartments.com/217-23rd-ave-seattle-wa/xhftpkm/) at 217 23rd Avenue in Squire Park; Mike subsequently moved to [Harbor Steps Apartments](https://www.equityapartments.com/seattle/downtown-seattle/harbor-steps-apartments) at 1221 First Avenue in Downtown Seattle.
> 
> Perkins Coie does litigate [class actions](https://www.perkinscoie.com/en/practices/litigation/class-action-defense/experience.html), although their specialty is representing the companies being sued rather than the plaintiffs filing the suit.
> 
> The class action against [Optum360](https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/tcpa/909253-optum360-fax-ads-class-action-settlement/) is real, although the plaintiffs were represented by [Bock, Hatch, Lewis & Oppenheim, LLC](https://bockhatchllc.com/) rather than the very fictional Forsyth Ross.
> 
> The [Washington State Supreme Court](http://www.courts.wa.gov/appellate_trial_courts/SupremeCourt/) is responsible for disbarring attorneys in Seattle.


End file.
